Dvips ¶

2.4.1 Debug options ¶

The ‘-d’ flag to Dvips helps in tracking down certain errors. The parameter to this flag is an integer that tells what errors are currently being tracked. To track a certain class of debug messages, specify the appropriate number given below; if you wish to track multiple classes, sum the numbers of the classes you wish to track. To track all classes, you can use -1.

You can also set the environment variable KPATHSEA_DEBUG instead of using ‘-d’. Some of these debugging options are actually provided by Kpathsea (see Debugging in Kpathsea).

The classes are:

1

specials

2

paths

4

fonts

8

pages

16

headers

32

font compression

64

files

128

(omitted)

256

config files

512

Kpathsea stat calls

1024

Kpathsea hash table lookups

2048

Kpathsea path element expansion

4096

Kpathsea path searches

2.4.2 No output at all ¶

If you are not getting any output at all, even from the simplest one-character file (for instance, ‘\ \bye’), then something is very wrong. Practically any file sent to a PostScript laser printer should generate some output, at the very least a page detailing what error occurred, if any. Talk to your system administrator about downloading a PostScript error handler. (Adobe distributes a good one called ‘ehandler.ps’.)

It is possible, especially if you are using non-Adobe PostScript, that your PostScript interpreter is broken. Even then it should generate an error message. Dvips tries to work around as many bugs as possible in common non-Adobe PostScript interpreters, but doubtless it misses a few. PowerPage Revision 1, Interpreter Version 20001.001, on a Mitsubishi Shinko CHC-S446i color thermal dye sublimation printer is known to be unable to print with any but builtin fonts.

If Dvips gives any strange error messages, or compilation on your machine generated a lot of warnings, perhaps the Dvips program itself is broken. Try using the debug options to determine where the error occurred (see Debug options).

It is possible your spooler is broken and is misinterpreting the structured comments. Try the ‘-N’ flag to turn off structured comments and see what happens.

2.4.3 Output too small or inverted ¶

If some documents come out inverted or too small, probably your spooler is not supplying an end of job indicator at the end of each file. (This commonly happens on small machines that don’t have spoolers.) You can force Dvips to do this with the ‘-F’ flag (or ‘F’ config file option), but this generates files with a terminating binary character (control-D). You can also try using the ‘-s’ flag (or ‘s’ config file option) to enclose the entire job in a save/restore pair. See Command-line options, and Dvips configuration files.

2.4.4 Error messages from printer ¶

If your printer returns error messages, the error message gives very good information on what might be going wrong. One of the most common error messages is ‘bop undefined’. This is caused by old versions of Transcript and other spoolers that do not properly parse the setup section of the PostScript. To fix this, turn off structured comments with the ‘-N’ option, but it’d be best to get your spooling software updated.

Another error message is ‘VM exhausted’. Some printers indicate this error by locking up, others quietly reset. This is caused by Dvips thinking that the printer has more memory than it actually does, and then printing a complicated document. To fix this, try lowering the ‘m’ parameter in the configuration file; use the debug option to make sure you adjust the correct file.

Other errors may indicate you are trying to include graphics that don’t nest properly in other PostScript documents, among other things. Try the PostScript file on a QMS PS-810 or other Adobe PostScript printer if you have one, or Ghostscript (see Ghostscript installation); it might be a problem with the printer itself.

2.4.5 Long documents fail to print ¶

This is usually caused by incorrectly specifying the amount of memory the printer has in the configuration file; see the previous section.

2.4.6 Including graphics fails ¶

The most common problem with including graphics is an incorrect bounding box (see The bounding box comment). Complain to whoever wrote the software that generated the file if the bounding box is indeed incorrect.

Another possible problem is that the figure you are trying to include does not nest properly; there are certain rules PostScript applications must follow when generating files to be included. The Dvips program includes work-arounds for such errors in Adobe Illustrator and other programs, but there are certainly applications that haven’t been tested.

One possible thing to try is the ‘-K’ flag which strips the comments from an included figure. This might be necessary if the PostScript spooling software does not read the structured comments correctly. Use of this flag will break graphics from some applications, though, since some applications read the PostScript file from the input stream, looking for a particular comment.

Any application which generates graphics output containing raw binary (not ASCII hex) will probably fail with Dvips.

3.2.1 Option summary ¶

Here is a handy summary of the options; it is printed out when you run Dvips with no arguments or with the standard ‘--help’ option.

Usage: dvips [OPTION]... FILENAME[.dvi]
Convert DVI input files to PostScript.
See http://tug.org/dvips/ for the full manual and other information.

Options:
-a*  Conserve memory, not time       -A   Print only odd (TeX) pages
-b # Page copies, for posters e.g.   -B   Print only even (TeX) pages
-c # Uncollated copies               -C # Collated copies
-d # Debugging                       -D # Resolution
-e # Maxdrift value                  -E*  Try to create EPSF
-f*  Run as filter                   -F*  Send control-D at end
                                     -G*  Shift low chars to higher pos.
-h f Add header file
-i*  Separate file per section
-j*  Download fonts partially
-k*  Print crop marks                -K*  Pull comments from inclusions
-l # Last page                       -L*  Last special papersize wins
-m*  Manual feed                     -M*  Don't make fonts
-mode s Metafont device name
-n # Maximum number of pages         -N*  No structured comments
-noomega  Disable Omega extensions
-noptex   Disable pTeX extensions
-o f Output file                     -O c Set/change paper offset
-p # First page                      -P s Load config.$s
-pp l Print only pages listed
-q*  Run quietly
-r*  Reverse order of pages          -R*  Run securely
-s*  Enclose output in save/restore  -S # Max section size in pages
-t s Paper format                    -T c Specify desired page size
-title s Title in comment
-u s PS mapfile                      -U*  Disable string param trick
-v   Print version number and quit   -V*  Send downloadable PS fonts as PK
-x # Override dvi magnification      -X # Horizontal resolution
-y # Multiply by dvi magnification   -Y # Vertical resolution
-z*  Hyper PS                        -Z*  Compress bitmap fonts
    # = number   f = file   s = string  * = suffix, `0' to turn off
    c = comma-separated dimension pair (e.g., 3.2in,-32.1cm)
    l = comma-separated list of page ranges (e.g., 1-4,7-9)

Email bug reports to tex-k@mail.tug.org.

3.2.2 Option details ¶

Many of the parameterless options listed here can be turned off by suffixing the option with a zero (‘0’); for instance, to turn off page reversal, use ‘-r0’. Such options are marked with a trailing ‘*’.

‘-’ ¶

Read additional options from standard input after processing the command line.

‘--help’ ¶

Print a usage message and exit.

‘--version’ ¶

Print the version number and exit.

‘-a*’ ¶

Conserve memory by making three passes over the DVI file instead of two and only loading those characters actually used. Generally only useful on machines with a very limited amount of memory, like some PCs.

‘-A’ ¶

Print only the odd pages. This option uses TeX page numbers, not physical page numbers.

‘-b num’ ¶

Generate num copies of each page, but duplicating the page body rather than using the ‘/#copies’ PostScript variable. This can be useful in conjunction with a header file setting ‘bop-hook’ to do color separations or other neat tricks.

‘-B’ ¶

Print only the even pages. This option uses TeX page numbers, not physical page numbers.

‘-bitmapfontenc option’ ¶

Turns bitmap font encoding to ‘off’, ‘on’ (no warnings for missing bitmap font encodings), or ‘strict’ (with warnings for missing bitmap font encodings).

‘-c num’ ¶

Generate num consecutive copies of every page, i.e., the output is uncollated. This merely sets the builtin PostScript variable ‘/#copies’.

‘-C num’ ¶

Generate num copies, but collated (by replicating the data in the PostScript file). Slower than the ‘-c’ option, but easier on the hands, and faster than resubmitting the same PostScript file multiple times.

‘-d num’ ¶

Set the debug flags, showing what Dvips (thinks it) is doing. This will work unless Dvips has been compiled without the ‘DEBUG’ option (not recommended). See Debug options, for the possible values of num. Use ‘-d -1’ as the first option for maximum output.

‘-D num’ ¶

Set both the horizontal and vertical resolution to num, given in dpi (dots per inch). This affects the choice of bitmap fonts that are loaded and also the positioning of letters in resident PostScript fonts. Must be between 10 and 10000. This affects both the horizontal and vertical resolution. If a high resolution (something greater than 400 dpi, say) is selected, the ‘-Z’ flag should probably also be used. If you are using fonts made with Metafont, such as Computer Modern, mktexpk needs to know about the value for num that you use or Metafont will fail. See the file ftp://ftp.tug.org/tex/modes.mf for a list of resolutions and mode names for most devices.

‘-e num’ ¶

Maximum drift in pixels of each character from its ‘true’ resolution-independent position on the page. The default value of this parameter is resolution dependent (it is the number of entries in the list [100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1600, 2000, 2400, 2800, 3200, …] that are less than or equal to the resolution in dots per inch). Allowing individual characters to ‘drift’ from their correctly rounded positions by a few pixels, while regaining the true position at the beginning of each new word, improves the spacing of letters in words.

‘-E*’ ¶

Generate an EPSF file with a tight bounding box. This only looks at marks made by characters and rules, not by any included graphics. In addition, it gets the glyph metrics from the TFM file, so characters that print outside their enclosing TFM box may confuse it. In addition, the bounding box might be a bit too loose if the character glyph has significant left or right side bearings. Nonetheless, this option works well enough for creating small EPSF files for equations or tables or the like. (Of course, Dvips output, especially when using bitmap fonts, is resolution-dependent and thus does not make very good EPSF files, especially if the images are to be scaled; use these EPSF files with care.) For multiple page input files, also specify ‘-i’ to get each page as a separate EPSF file; otherwise, all the pages are overlaid in the single output file.

‘-f*’ ¶

Run as a filter. Read the DVI file from standard input and write the PostScript to standard output. The standard input must be seekable, so it cannot be a pipe. If your input must be a pipe, write a shell script that copies the pipe output to a temporary file and then points Dvips at this file. This option also disables the automatic reading of the PRINTER environment variable; use ‘-P$PRINTER’ after the ‘-f’ to read it anyway. It also turns off the automatic sending of control-D if it was turned on with the ‘-F’ option or in the configuration file; use ‘-F’ after the ‘-f’ to send it anyway.

‘-F*’ ¶

Write control-D (ASCII code 4) as the very last character of the PostScript file. This is useful when Dvips is driving the printer directly instead of working through a spooler, as is common on personal systems. On systems shared by more than one person, this is not recommended.

‘-G*’ ¶

Shift non-printing characters (ASCII 0-32, 127) to higher-numbered positions. This was useful to work around bugs in old versions of Adobe’s PDF reader. It’s more likely to cause problems nowadays.

‘-h name’ ¶

Prepend name as an additional header file, or, if name is ‘-’, suppress inclusion of default header files. If -h is given multiple times, the headers are included in the order given. Any definitions in the header file get added to the PostScript ‘userdict’.

‘-i*’ ¶

Make each section be a separate file; a section is a part of the document processed independently, most often created to avoid memory overflow. The filenames are created replacing the suffix of the supplied output file name by a three-digit sequence number. This option is most often used in conjunction with the ‘-S’ option which sets the maximum section length in pages; if ‘-i’ is specified and ‘-S’ is not, each page is output as a separate file. For instance, some phototypesetters cannot print more than ten or so consecutive pages before running out of steam; these options can be used to automatically split a book into ten-page sections, each to its own file.

On the other hand, if your document uses very large fonts or very large included figures, Dvips might take it upon itself to split the output into unwanted sections, to try to avoid overflowing printer memory. See Headers and memory usage, for ways to handle this.

‘-j*’ ¶

Download only needed characters from Type 1 fonts. This is the default in the current release. Some debugging flags trace this operation (see Debug options). You can also control partial downloading on a per-font basis (see psfonts.map: PostScript font catalog).

‘-k*’ ¶

Print crop marks. This option increases the paper size (which should be specified, either with a paper size special or with the ‘-T’ option) by a half inch in each dimension. It translates each page by a quarter inch and draws cross-style crop marks. It is mostly useful with typesetters that can set the page size automatically. This works by downloading crop.pro.

‘-K*’ ¶

Remove comments in included PostScript graphics, font files, and headers; only necessary to get around bugs in spoolers or PostScript post-processing programs. Specifically, the ‘%%Page’ comments, when left in, often cause difficulties. Use of this flag can cause other graphics to fail, however, since the PostScript header macros from some software packages read portion the input stream line by line, searching for a particular comment.

‘-l [=]num[.pageseq]’ ¶

The last page printed will be the first one numbered num; the default is the last page in the document.

By default, num is compared to TeX’s idea of the page number (more precisely, the \count0 value written in the DVI file). But if num is prefixed by an equals sign, then it (and the argument to the ‘-p’ option, if specified) is treated as a physical (absolute) page number, Thus, using ‘-l =9’ will end the output with the ninth page of the document, no matter what the pages are actually numbered.

On the other hand, if pageseq is specified, the pageseqth occurrence of the given TeX page number is used. For example, ‘-l 99.2’ says to end with the second page numbered 99 in the document. The ‘=’ and lastseq features aren’t useful together.

‘-L*’ ¶

By default or with -L1, the last ‘papersize’ special wins; with -L0, the first special wins. See ‘papersize’ special.

‘-landscaperotate*’ ¶

When looking for matching paper sizes, permit rotation of page content on the page to match the given size; the default, as of Dvips 2022.1, is not to do this. It should not be needed in modern systems with normal print spoolers, and can be harmful when converting to PDF (see Configuration file paper size command). This option accepts an optional suffix of 0 (to explicitly disable) or 1 (to explicitly enable); if the option is specified without a suffix, it enables the behavior.

‘-m*’ ¶

Specify manual feed, if supported by the output device.

‘-mode mode’ ¶

Use mode as the Metafont device name for path searching and font generation. This overrides any value from configuration files. With the default paths, explicitly specifying the mode also makes the program assume the fonts are in a subdirectory named mode. See TeX directory structure in Kpathsea. If Metafont does not understand the mode name, see Unable to generate fonts in Kpathsea.

‘-M*’ ¶

Turns off automatic font generation (mktexpk). If mktexpk, the invocation is appended to a file missfont.log (by default) in the current directory. You can then execute the log file to create the missing files after fixing the problem. If the current directory is not writable and the environment variable or configuration file value ‘TEXMFOUTPUT’ is set, its value is used. Otherwise, nothing is written. The name ‘missfont.log’ is overridden by the ‘MISSFONT_LOG’ environment variable or configuration file value.

‘-n num’ ¶

Print at most num pages. Default is 100000.

‘-N*’ ¶

Turns off generation of structured comments such as ‘%%Page’; this may be necessary on some systems that try to interpret PostScript comments in weird ways, or on some PostScript printers. Old versions of TranScript in particular cannot handle modern Encapsulated PostScript. Beware: This also disables page movement, etc., in PostScript viewers such as Ghostview.

‘-noomega’ ¶

Disable the use of Omega extensions when interpreting DVI files. By default, the additional opcodes ‘129’ and ‘134’ are recognized by Dvips as Omega or pTeX extensions and interpreted as requests to set 2-byte characters.

‘-noptex’ ¶

Disable the use of pTeX extensions when interpreting DVI files. By default, the additional opcodes ‘130’ and ‘135’ are recognized by Dvips as Omega extensions and interpreted as requests to set 3-byte characters, and ‘255’ as request to change the typesetting direction.

The only drawback is that the virtual font array will (at least temporarily) require 65536 or more positions instead of the default 256 positions, i.e., the memory requirements of Dvips will be somewhat larger. If you find this unacceptable or encounter another problem with the Omega or pTeX extensions, you can switch off the pTeX extension by using ‘-noptex’, or both by using ‘-noomega’ (but please do send a bug report if you find such problems, see Bugs in Kpathsea).

‘-o name’ ¶

Send output to the file name. If ‘-o’ is specified without name (i.e., it is the last thing on the command line), the default is ‘file.ps’ where the input DVI file was ‘file.dvi’. If ‘-o’ isn’t given at all, the configuration file default is used.

If name is ‘-’, output goes to standard output. If the first character of name is ‘!’ or ‘|’, then the remainder will be used as an argument to popen; thus, specifying ‘|lpr’ as the output file will automatically queue the file for printing as usual. (The MS-DOS version will print to the local printer device PRN when name is ‘|lpr’ and a program by that name cannot be found.)

‘-o’ disables the automatic reading of the PRINTER environment variable, and turns off the automatic sending of control-D. See the ‘-f’ option for how to override this.

‘-O x-offset,y-offset’ ¶

Move the origin by x-offset,y-offset, a comma-separated pair of dimensions such as ‘.1in,-.3cm’ (see ‘papersize’ special). The origin of the page is shifted from the default position (of one inch down, one inch to the right from the upper left corner of the paper) by this amount. This is usually best specified in the printer-specific configuration file.

This is useful for a printer that consistently offsets output pages by a certain amount. You can use the file testpage.tex to determine the correct value for your printer. Be sure to do several runs with the same O value—some printers vary widely from run to run.

If your printer offsets every other page consistently, instead of every page, your best recourse is to use ‘bop-hook’ (see PostScript hooks).

‘-p [=]num[.pageseq]’ ¶

Exactly analogous to -l (q.v.), but specifying the first page number to be printed (processed).

‘-pp first-last’ ¶

Print pages first through last; equivalent to ‘-p first -l last’, except that multiple ‘-pp’ options accumulate, unlike ‘-p’ and ‘-l’. The ‘-’ separator can also be ‘:’.

‘-P printer’ ¶

Read the configuration file config.printer (printer.cfg on MS-DOS), which typically sets the output name (most likely ‘o |lpr -Pprinter’), resolution, Metafont mode, and perhaps other printer-specific defaults. It works best to put sitewide defaults in the one master ‘config.ps’ file and only things that vary from printer to printer in the ‘config.printer’ files; ‘config.ps’ is read before ‘config.printer’.

A configuration file for eventual creation of Adobe PDF files is provided in ‘config.pdf’ and thus can be loaded with ‘-Ppdf’. It will try to include Type 1 outline fonts into the PostScript file (see Hypertext caveats).

If no ‘-P’ or ‘-o’ is given, the environment variable PRINTER is checked. If that variable exists, and a corresponding config.printer (printer.cfg on MS-DOS) file exists, it is read. See Configuration file searching.

‘-q*’ ¶

Run quietly. Don’t chatter about pages converted, etc., and report no warnings (only errors) to standard error.

‘-r*’ ¶

Output pages in reverse order. By default, page 1 is output first.

‘-R’ ¶

Run securely. ‘-R2’ disables both shell command execution in \special (via ‘`’, see Dynamic creation of PostScript graphics files) and config files (via the ‘E’ option, see Configuration file commands) and opening of any absolute or ..-relative filenames. ‘-R1’, the default, forbids shell escapes but allows absolute filenames. ‘-R0’ allows both.

‘-s*’ ¶

Enclose the output in a global save/restore pair. This causes the file to not be truly conformant, and is thus not recommended, but is useful if you are driving a deficient printer directly and thus don’t care too much about the portability of the output to other environments.

‘-S num’ ¶

Set the maximum number of pages in each ‘section’. This option is most commonly used with the ‘-i’ option; see its description above for more information.

‘-t papertype’ ¶

Set the paper type to papertype, usually defined in one of the configuration files, along with the appropriate PostScript code to select it (see Configuration file paper size command).

• You can also specify a papertype of ‘landscape’, which rotates a document by 90 degrees.
• To rotate a document whose paper type is not the default, you can use the ‘-t’ option twice, once for the paper type, and once for ‘landscape’.
• In general, you should not use any ‘-t’ option when using a ‘papersize’ special, which some LaTeX packages (e.g., ‘hyperref’) insert.
• One exception is when using a nonstandard paper size that is not already defined in config.ps; in this case, you need to specify ‘-t unknown’.
• Another exception is when producing multi-page files for further processing; use ‘-t nopaper’ to omit any paper size information in the output. (If you just have a single page document, you can use ‘-E’ to get pure EPSF output.)

‘-title string’ ¶

Use string as the title in the generated PostScript (%%Title). If not specified, the default is the basename of the input file; for example, running dvips /foo/bar.dvi will have a %%Title of ‘bar.dvi’.

‘-T hsize,vsize’ ¶

Set the paper size to (hsize,vsize), a comma-separated pair of dimensions such as ‘.1in,-.3cm’ (see ‘papersize’ special). It overrides any paper size special in the DVI file. Be careful, as the paper size will stick to a predefined size if there is one close enough. To disable this behavior, use ‘-tunknown’.

‘-u psmapfile’ ¶

Set psmapfile to be the file that dvips uses for looking up PostScript font aliases. If psmapfile begins with a ‘+’ character, then the rest of the name is used as the name of the map file, and the map file is appended to the list of map files (instead of replacing the list). In either case, if the name has no extension, then ‘.map’ is added at the end.

‘-U*’ ¶

Disable a PostScript virtual memory-saving optimization that stores the character metric information in the same string that is used to store the bitmap information. This is only necessary when driving the Xerox 4045 PostScript interpreter, which has a bug that puts garbage on the bottom of each character. Not recommended unless you must drive this printer.

‘-v’ ¶

Print the dvips version number and exit.

‘-V*’ ¶

Download non-resident PostScript fonts as bitmaps. This requires use of mtpk or gsftopk or pstopk or some combination thereof to generate the required bitmap fonts; these programs are supplied with Dvips. The bitmap must be put into psfonts.map as the downloadable file for that font. This is useful only for those fonts for which you do not have real outlines, being downloaded to printers that have no resident fonts, i.e., very rarely.

‘-x num’ ¶

Set the magnification ratio to num/1000. Overrides the magnification specified in the DVI file. Must be between 10 and 100000. It is recommended that you use standard magstep values (1095, 1200, 1440, 1728, 2074, 2488, 2986, and so on) to help reduce the total number of PK files generated. num may be a real number, not an integer, for increased precision.

‘-X num’ ¶

Set the horizontal resolution in dots per inch to num.

‘-y num’ ¶

Set the magnification ratio to num/1000 times the magnification specified in the DVI file. See ‘-x’ above.

‘-Y num’ ¶

Set the vertical resolution in dots per inch to num.

‘-z*’ ¶

Pass ‘html’ hyperdvi specials through to the output for eventual distillation into PDF. This is not enabled by default to avoid including the header files unnecessarily, and use of temporary files in creating the output. See HyperTeXt.

‘-Z*’ ¶

Compress bitmap fonts in the output file, thereby reducing the size of what gets downloaded. Especially useful at high resolutions or when very large fonts are used. May slow down printing, especially on early 68000-based PostScript printers. Generally recommend today, and can be enabled in the configuration file (see Configuration file commands).

3.4.1 Configuration file searching ¶

The Dvips program loads many different configuration files, so that parameters can be set globally across the system, on a per-device basis, or individually by each user.

1. Dvips first reads (if it exists) config.ps; it is searched for along the path for Dvips configuration files, as described in Supported file formats in Kpathsea.
2. A user-specific startup file is loaded, so individual users can override any options set in the global file. The environment variable DVIPSRC, if defined, is used as the specification of the startup file. If this variable is undefined, Dvips uses a platform-specific default name. On Unix Dvips looks for the default startup file under the name $HOME/.dvipsrc, which is in the user’s home directory. On MS-DOS and MS-Windows, where users generally don’t have their private directories, the startup file is called dvips.ini and it is searched for along the path for Dvips configuration files (as described in Supported file formats in Kpathsea.); users are expected to set this path as they see fit for their taste.
3. The command line is read and parsed: if the ‘-Pdevice’ option is encountered, at that point config.device is loaded. Thus, the printer configuration file can override anything in the site-wide or user configuration file, and it can also override options in the command line up to the point that the ‘-P’ option was encountered. (On MS-DOS, the printer configuration files are called device.cfg, since DOS doesn’t allow more than 3 characters after the dot in filenames.)
4. If no ‘-P’ option was specified, and also the ‘-o’ and ‘-f’ command line options were not used, Dvips checks the environment variable PRINTER. If it exists, then config.$PRINTER ($PRINTER.cfg on MS-DOS) is loaded (if it exists).

Because the .dvipsrc file is read before the printer-specific configuration files, individual users cannot override settings in the latter. On the other hand, the TEXCONFIG path can be set to anything, so the users can always define their own printer-specific configuration files to be found before the system’s.

A few command-line options are treated specially, in that they are not overridden by configuration files:

‘-D’

As well as setting the resolution, this unsets the mode, if the mode was previously set from a configuration file. If config.$PRINTER is read, however, any ‘D’ or ‘M’ lines from there will take effect.

‘-mode’

This overrides any mode setting (‘M’ line) in configuration files. ‘-mode’ does not affect the resolution.

‘-o’

This overrides any output setting (‘o’ line) in configuration files.

The purpose of these special cases is to (1) minimize the chance of having a mismatched mode and resolution (which ‘mktexpk’ cannot resolve), and (2) let command-line options override config files where possible.

3.4.2 Configuration file commands ¶

Most of the configuration file commands are similar to corresponding command line options, but there are a few exceptions. When they are the same, we omit the description here.

As with command line options, many may be turned off by suffixing the letter with a zero (‘0’).

Within a configuration file, empty lines, and lines starting with a space, asterisk, equal sign, percent sign, or pound sign are ignored. There is no provision for continuation lines.

‘@ name hsize vsize’ ¶

Define paper sizes. See Configuration file paper size command.

‘a*’ ¶

Memory conservation. Same as ‘-a’, see Option details.

‘b #copies’ ¶

Multiple copies. Same as ‘-b’, see Option details.

‘bitmapfontenc option’ ¶

Turns bitmap font encoding to ‘off’, ‘on’ (no warnings for missing bitmap font encodings), or ‘strict’ (with warnings for missing bitmap font encodings).

‘c filename’ ¶

Include filename as an additional configuration file, read immediately.

‘D dpi’ ¶

Output resolution. Same as ‘-D’, see Option details.

‘e num’ ¶

Max drift. Same as ‘-e’, see Option details.

‘E command’ ¶

Executes the command listed with system(3); can be used to get the current date into a header file for inclusion, for instance. Possibly dangerous; this may be disabled, in which case a warning will be printed if the option is used (and warnings are not suppressed).

‘f*’ ¶

‘F’

Run as a filter. Same as ‘-f’, see Option details.

‘G*’ ¶

Shift low-numbered characters; obsolete. Same as ‘-G’, see Option details.

‘h header’ ¶

Prepend header to output. Same as ‘h-’; that is, the config file h directive suppresses any inclusion of standard headers (see Option details).

‘H path’ ¶

Use path to search for PostScript header files. The environment variable DVIPSHEADERS overrides this.

‘i n’ ¶

Make multiple output files. Same as ‘-i -S n’, see Option details.

‘j*’ ¶

Partially download Type 1 fonts. Same as ‘-j’, see Option details.

‘K*’ ¶

Remove comments from included PostScript files. Same as ‘-K’, see Option details.

‘L*’ ¶

If zero, the first paper size specified is effective, else the last. Same as ‘-L’, see Option details.

‘landscaperotate’ ¶

Permit rotation of page content to match page size. Same as ‘-landscaperotate’, see Option details.

‘m num’ ¶

Declare num as the memory available for fonts and strings in the printer. The compile-time default is 180000, but this is typically overridden by config.ps or other configuration files. This value must be accurate if memory conservation and document splitting is to work correctly. To determine this value, send the following file to the printer:

%! Hey, we're PostScript
/Times-Roman findfont 30 scalefont setfont 144 432 moveto
vmstatus exch sub 40 string cvs show pop showpage

The number printed by this file is the total memory free; it is usually best to tell Dvips that the printer has slightly less memory, because many programs download permanent macros that can reduce the memory in the printer. Some systems or printers can dynamically increase the memory available to a PostScript interpreter, in which case this file might return a ridiculously low number; for example, the NeXT computer and Ghostscript. In these cases, a value of, say, 10 million is likely fine.

To go all out: If num is zero or negative, Dvips sets the available memory to a very large number (the maximum integer value in C), the idea being that output is not to a printer and thus no splitting of the output is desirable. The Dvips config file config.maxmem is provided to do this conveniently, namely with ‘dvips -Pmaxmem’.

‘M mode’ ¶

Metafont mode. Same as ‘-mode’, see Option details.

‘N*’ ¶

Disable structured comments. Beware: This also turns off displaying page numbers or changing to specific page numbers in PostScript viewers. Same as ‘-N’, see Option details.

‘o name’ ¶

Send output to name. Same as ‘-o’, see Option details. In the file config.foo, a setting like this is probably appropriate:

o |lpr -Pfoo

The MS-DOS version will emulate spooling to lpr by printing to the local printer device PRN if it doesn’t find an executable program by that name in the current directory or along the PATH.

‘O xoff,yoff’ ¶

Origin offset. Same as ‘-O’, see Option details.

‘p [+]name’ ¶

Examine name for PostScript font aliases. Default is psfonts.map. This option allows you to specify different resident fonts that different printers may have. If name starts with a ‘+’ character, then the rest of the name (after any leading spaces) is used as an additional map file; thus, it is possible to have local map files pointed to by local configuration files that append to the global map file. This can be used for font families.

‘P path’ ¶

Use path to search for bitmap PK font files is path. The PKFONTS, TEXPKS, GLYPHFONTS, and TEXFONTS environment variables override this. See Supported file formats in Kpathsea.

‘q*’ ¶

‘Q’

Run quietly. Same as ‘-q’, see Option details.

‘r*’ ¶

Page reversal. Same as ‘-r’, see Option details.

‘R num1 num2 …’ ¶

Define the list of default resolutions for PK fonts. If a font size actually used in a document is not available and cannot be created, Dvips will scale the font found at the closest of these resolutions to the requested size, using PostScript scaling. The resulting output may be ugly, and thus a warning is issued. To turn this last-resort scaling off, use a line with just the ‘R’ and no numbers.

The given numbers must be sorted in increasing order; any number smaller than the preceding one is ignored. This is because it is better to scale a font up than down; scaling down can obliterate small features in the character shape.

The environment and config file values ‘DVIPSSIZES’ or ‘TEXSIZES’ override this configuration file setting.

If no ‘R’ settings or environment variables are specified, a list compiled in during installation is used. This default list is defined by the Makefile variable ‘default_texsizes’, defined in the file make/paths.make.

‘s*’ ¶

Output global save/restore. Same as ‘-s’, see Option details.

‘S path’ ¶

Use path to search for special illustrations (Encapsulated PostScript files or psfiles). The TEXPICTS and then TEXINPUTS environment variables override this.

‘T path’ ¶

Use path to search for TFM files. The TFMFONTS and then TEXFONTS environment variables overrides this. This path is used for resident fonts and fonts that can’t otherwise be found.

‘U*’ ¶

Work around bug in Xerox 4045 printer. Same as ‘-U’, see Option details.

‘V path’ ¶

Use path to search for virtual font files. This may be device-dependent if you use virtual fonts to simulate actual fonts on different devices.

‘W [string]’ ¶

If string is supplied, write it to standard error after reading all the configuration files; with no string, cancel any previous ‘W’ message. This is useful in the default configuration file to remind users to specify a printer, for instance, or to notify users about special characteristics of a particular printer.

‘X num’ ¶

Horizontal resolution. Same as ‘-X’ (see Option details).

‘Y num’ ¶

Vertical resolution. Same as ‘-Y’ (see Option details).

‘Z*’ ¶

Compress bitmap fonts. Same as ‘-Z’ (see Option details).

‘z*’ ¶

Disables execution of system commands, like ‘-R’ (see Option details). If ‘-R’ is specified on the command line, that takes precedence.

5.1.1 The bounding box comment ¶

The most important feature of a good PostScript file from the standpoint of including it in another document is an accurate bounding box comment. Every well-formed PostScript file has a comment describing where on the page the graphic is located, and how big that graphic is.

This information is given as the lower left and upper right corners of the box just enclosing the graphic, and is thus referred to as the bounding box. These coordinates are given in the default PostScript units (there are precisely 72 PostScript units to the inch, like TeX big points) with respect to the lower left corner of the sheet of paper.

To see if a PostScript file has a bounding box comment, just look at the first few lines of the file. PostScript files are standard ASCII, so you can use any text editor to do this. If within the first few dozen lines there is a line like

%%BoundingBox: 25 50 400 300

(with any reasonable numbers), chances are very good that the file is Encapsulated PostScript and will work easily with Dvips. If the file contains instead a line like

%%BoundingBox: (atend)

the file is still probably Encapsulated PostScript, but the bounding box is given at the end of the file. Dvips needs it at the beginning. You can move it with that same text editor, or a simple script. (The bounding box is given in this way when the program that generated the PostScript couldn’t know the size in advance, or was too lazy to compute it.)

If the document lacks a ‘%%BoundingBox:’ altogether, you can determine one in a couple of ways. One is to use the ‘bbfig’ program distributed with Dvips in the contrib directory. This can usually find the correct bounding box automatically; it works best with Ghostscript.

If the comment looks like this:

%%BoundingBox: 0 0 612 792

the graphic claims to take up an entire sheet of paper. This is usually a symptom of a bug in the program that generated it.

The other is to do it yourself: print the file. Now, take a ruler, and make the following measurements (in PostScript units, so measure in inches and multiply by 72): From the left edge of the paper to the leftmost mark on the paper is llx, the first number. From the bottom edge of the paper to the bottommost mark on the paper is lly, the second number. From the left edge of the paper to the rightmost mark on the paper is urx, the third number. The fourth and final number, ury, is the distance from the bottom of the page to the uppermost mark on the paper.

Once you have the numbers, add a comment of the following form as the second line of the document. (The first line should already be a line starting with the two characters ‘%!’; if it is not, the file probably isn’t PostScript.)

%%BoundingBox: llx lly urx ury

Or, if you don’t want to modify the file, you can simply write these numbers down in a convenient place and give them in your TeX document when you import the graphic, as described in the next section.

If the document does not have such a bounding box, or if the bounding box is given at the end of the document, or the bounding box is wrong, please complain to the authors of the software package that generated the file.

5.1.2 The \includegraphics macro for LaTeX ¶

Once the figure file has a bounding box comment (see the previous section) you are ready to import the graphic into a LaTeX document. For LaTeX2e, you can use the epsf, graphics or graphicx packages, but the last is recommended—it has the most flexible syntax, and is briefly described here. Further information can be found in grfguide or epslatex, which should be included in your LaTeX distribution in DVI, PDF, or other formats. (If you are still using LaTeX 2.09, use epsf.sty).

Just put the following command into your preamble:

\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}

Depending on your system, a suitable driver setup may already be present, so that LaTeX automatically produces DVI files suitable for Dvips. In this case you can leave out the ‘[dvips]’ parameter.

Now, at the point you want to include a file foo.eps, enter a line such as:

\includegraphics{foo.eps}

However, it is usually best to omit the file extension and only use

\includegraphics{foo}

because then you can process the same LaTeX file with different TeX engines or DVI converters if you also provide suitable graphics files for them, e.g., foo.pdf or foo.png.

The \includegraphics command has many options, specified in ‘key=value’ syntax, to allow you to resize, rotate or trim the included graphic—see grfguide or epslatex. If your file does not have a bounding box comment, you can supply the numbers as determined in the previous section, in the same order they would have been in a normal bounding box comment:

\includegraphics[bb=100 100 500 500]{foo.ps}

Now, save your changes and run LaTeX and Dvips; the output should have your graphic positioned at precisely the point you indicated, occupying the proper amount of space.

PostScript graphics have their origin in the lower left corner. Therefore, in TeX, a graphic will occupy a box that extends far above the line where it is put in, but has depth zero below it. Combining ‘\includegraphics’ with ‘\parbox’ commands or minipages can sometimes be confusing when this is not taken into account.

5.1.3 Using the EPSF macros ¶

If you are using LaTeX2e, use the ‘graphics’ or ‘graphicx’ package. See The \includegraphics macro for LaTeX.

If you are using plain TeX or LaTeX 2.09, you need epsf.tex (for plain TeX) and epsf.sty (for LaTeX). For plain TeX, add a line like this near the top of your input file:

\input epsf

If you are using LaTeX 2.09, add the ‘epsf’ style option, as in:

\documentstyle[12pt,epsf]{article}

In any case, the above only needs to be done once, no matter how many figures you plan to include.

Now, at the point you want to include a file, enter a line such as:

\epsffile{foo.eps}

If you are using LaTeX, you may need to add \leavevmode immediately before the \epsffile command to get certain environments to work correctly. If your file does not have a bounding box comment, you can supply the numbers as determined in the previous section, in the same order they would have been in a normal bounding box comment:

\epsffile[100 100 500 500]{foo.ps}

Now, save your changes and run TeX and Dvips; the output should have your graphic positioned at precisely the point you indicated, occupying the proper amount of space.

The \epsffile macro typesets the figure as a TeX \vbox at the point of the page that the command is executed. By default, the graphic will have its ‘natural’ width (namely, the width of its bounding box). The TeX box will have depth zero and its natural height. By default, the graphic will be scaled by any DVI magnification in effect, just as is everything else in your document. See the next section for more information on scaling.

If you want TeX to report the size of the figure as a message on your terminal when it processes each figure, give the command:

\epsfverbosetrue

• EPSF scaling
• EPSF clipping

\epsfxsize=dimen

\epsfysize=dimen

\def\epsfsize#1#2{body}

\special{! /magscale false def}

\epsfclipon

\epsfclipoff

5.1.4 ‘psfile’ special ¶

The basic special for file inclusion is as follows:

\special{psfile=filename.ps [key=value] ... }

This downloads the PostScript file filename.ps such that the current point will be the origin of the PostScript coordinate system. The optional key=value assignments allow you to specify transformations on the PostScript.

The possible keys are:

‘hoffset’ ¶

The horizontal offset (default 0).

‘voffset’ ¶

The vertical offset (default 0).

‘hsize’ ¶

The horizontal clipping size (default 612).

‘vsize’ ¶

The vertical clipping size (default 792).

‘hscale’ ¶

The horizontal scaling factor, as a percentage (default 100).

‘vscale’ ¶

The vertical scaling factor, as a percentage (default 100).

‘angle’ ¶

The rotation, in degrees (default 0).

‘clip’ ¶

Enable clipping to the bounding box (default disabled).

‘llx, lly, urx, ury’ ¶

Bounding box of the included image, just as in a %%BoundingBox comment. Values are in big points, and may be fractional.

‘rhi, rwi’ ¶

Desired width and height of the resulting figure in the output, in tenths of big points (720 to the inch); may be fractional.

If both rwi and rhi are nonzero, the picture is scaled, possibly losing aspect ratio. If only one of rwi and rhi is nonzero, the picture is scaled, preserving aspect ratio.

The offsets and sizes are given in PostScript units (big points). Thus, for example:

\special{psfile=foo.ps hoffset=72 hscale=90 vscale=90}

will shift the graphics produced by file foo.ps right by one inch and will draw it at 0.9 times normal size. Offsets are given relative to the point of the special command, and are unaffected by scaling or rotation. Rotation is counterclockwise about the origin. The order of operations is to rotate the figure, scale it, then offset it.

For compatibility with older PostScript drivers, it is possible to change the units that ‘hscale’ and ‘vscale’ are given in. This can be done by redefining ‘@scaleunit’ in ‘SDict’ by a TeX command such as

\special{! /@scaleunit 1 def}

The ‘@scaleunit’ variable, which is by default 100, is what ‘hscale’ and ‘vscale’ are divided by to yield an absolute scale factor.

5.1.5 Dynamic creation of PostScript graphics files ¶

PostScript is an excellent page description language—but it does tend to be rather verbose. Compressing PostScript graphics files can reduce them by factor of five or more. For this reason, if the name of an included PostScript file ends with .Z or .gz, Dvips automatically runs ‘gzip -d’. For example:

\epsffile[72 72 540 720]{foo.ps.gz}

Since the results of such a command are not accessible to TeX, if you use this facility with the epsf macros, you need to supply the bounding box parameter yourself, as shown.

More generally, if the filename parameter to one of the graphics inclusion techniques starts with a left quote (‘`’), the parameter is instead interpreted as a command to execute that will send the actual file to standard output. For example:

\special{psfile="`gnuplot foo"}

to include the file foo. Of course, the command to be executed can be anything, including using a file conversion utility such as tek2ps or whatever is appropriate. This feature can be disabled with the ‘-R’ command-line option or ‘R’ configuration option.

5.1.6 Fonts in figures ¶

You can use any font available to TeX and Dvips within a graphics file by putting a %*Font: line in the leading commentary of the file. Schematically, this looks like:

%*Font: tfmname scaledbp designbp hex-start:hex-bitstring

Here is the meaning of each of these elements:

tfmname

The TeX TFM filename, e.g., cmr10. You can give the same tfmname on more than one ‘%*Font’ line; this is useful when the number of characters from the font used needs a longer hex-bitstring (see item below) than conveniently fits on one line.

scaledbp

The size at which you are using the font, in PostScript points (TeX big points). 72bp = 72.27pt = 1in.

designbp

The designsize of the font, again in PostScript points. This should match the value in the TFM file tfmname. Thus, for cmr10, it should be ‘9.96265’.

hex-start

The character code of the first character used from the font, specified as two ASCII hexadecimal characters, e.g., ‘4b’ or ‘4B’ for ‘K’.

hex-bitstring

An arbitrary number of ASCII hexadecimal digits specifying which characters following (and including) hex-start are used. This is treated as a bitmap. For example, if your figure used the single letter ‘K’, you would use ‘4b:8’ for hex-start and hex-bitstring. If it used ‘KLMNP’, you would use ‘4b:f4’.

MetaPost’s output figures contain lines like this for bitmap fonts used in a MetaPost label (see MetaPost in Web2c).

5.2.1 Including headers from TeX ¶

In order to get a particular graphic file to work, a certain font or header file might need to be sent first. The Dvips program provides support for this with the ‘header’ \special. For instance, to ensure that foo.ps gets downloaded:

\special{header=foo.ps}

As another example, if you have some PostScript code that uses a PostScript font not built into your printer, you must download it to the printer. If the font isn’t used elsewhere in the document, Dvips can’t know you’ve used it, so you must include it in the same way, as in:

\special{header=putr.pfa}

to include the font definition file for Adobe Utopia Roman.

The header also special allows for specifying some additional code that should be inserted into the PostScript document before and after the file itself, as follows:

\special{header={foo.ps} pre={pre code} post={post code}}

This will insert pre code just before foo.ps and post code just after. It is required to use the (balanced) braces in all of the arguments, including the header, when using this extended syntax.

This allows, for instance, dynamic headers, where some of the content depends on settings from the user in (La)TeX. Another application is the inclusion of graphics inside the PostScript header, so that they can be reused throughout the document, as with logs. That avoids including the same graphic several times. This is implemented in the graphics/graphicx-psmin package.

This extended syntax has one additional feature. When Dvips finds the extended syntax, it will also look in the installed tex/ tree(s) for the header file (foo.ps in our example), and not only in the current directory and dvips tree as the original syntax does. This is because common graphics may well come with packages which are installed in the tex/ tree.

5.2.2 Including headers from the command line ¶

You can include headers when you run Dvips, as well as from your document (see the previous section). To do this, run Dvips with the option ‘-P header’; this will read the file config.header, which in turn can specify a header file to be downloaded with the ‘h’ option. See Configuration file commands. These files are called header.cfg on MS-DOS.

You can arrange for the same file to serve as a ‘-P’ config file and the downloadable header file, by starting the lines of PostScript code with a space, leaving only the ‘h’ line and any comments starting in the first column. As an example, see contrib/volker/config.* (contrib/volker/*.cfg on MS-DOS). (These files also perform useful functions: controlling duplex/simplex mode on duplex printers, and setting various screen frequencies; contrib/volker/README explains further.)

5.2.3 Headers and memory usage ¶

Dvips tries to avoid overflowing the printer’s memory by splitting the output files into “sections” (see the ‘-i’ option in Option details). Therefore, for all header files, Dvips debits the printer VM budget by some value. If the header file has, in its leading commentary a line of the form

%%VMusage: min max

then max is used. If there is no %%VMusage line, then the size (in bytes) of the header file is used as an approximation. If you want a file to be ignored in the sectioning calculations, use ‘%%VMusage: 0 0’.

Illustrations (figure files) are also checked for %%VMusage line.

Therefore, if your document uses very large fonts or very large included figures, Dvips might take it upon itself to split the output into unwanted sections. If this causes problems, the simplest solution is to use ‘dvips -Pmaxmem’, which reads the Dvips file config.maxmem, which sets Dvips’s idea of the memory available to a very large number. (See the ‘m’ item in Configuration file commands.)

5.3.1 " special: Literal PostScript ¶

For simple graphics, or just for experimentation, literal PostScript code can be included. Simply use a \special beginning with a double quote character ‘"’; there is no matching closing ‘"’.

For instance, the following (simple) graphic:

was created by typing:

\vbox to 100bp{\vss % a bp is the same as a PostScript unit
  \special{" newpath 0 0 moveto 100 100 lineto 394 0 lineto
  closepath gsave 0.8 setgray fill grestore stroke}}

You are responsible for leaving space for such literal graphics, as with the \vbox above.

5.3.2 ‘ps’ special ¶

Generally, Dvips encloses specials in a PostScript save/restore pair, guaranteeing that the special will have no effect on the rest of the document. The ‘ps’ special, however, allows you to insert literal PostScript instructions without this protective shield; you should understand what you’re doing (and you shouldn’t change the PostScript graphics state unless you are willing to take the consequences). This command can take many forms because it has had a torturous history; any of the following will work:

\special{ps:text}
\special{ps::text}
\special{ps::[begin]text}
\special{ps::[end]text}
\special{ps::[nobreak]text}

(with longer forms taking precedence over shorter forms, when they are present). ‘ps::’ and ‘ps::[end]’ do no positioning, so they can be used to continue PostScript literals started with ‘ps:’ or ‘ps::[begin]’.

Literal PostScript instructions after ‘ps::[nobreak]’ are not broken into lines. This feature may be used to include PostScript comments, for example.

In addition, the variant

\special{ps: plotfile filename}

inserts the contents of filename verbatim into the output (except for omitting lines that begin with %). An example of the proper use of literal specials can be found in the file rotate.tex, which makes it easy to typeset text turned in multiples of 90 degrees.

5.3.3 Literal headers: ‘!’ \special ¶

You can download literal PostScript header code in your TeX document, for use with (for example) literal graphics code that you include later. The text of a \special beginning with an ‘!’ is copied into the output file. A dictionary SDict will be current when this code is executed; Dvips arranges for SDict to be first on the dictionary stack when any PostScript graphic is included, whether literally (the ‘"’ special) or through macros (e.g., epsf.tex).

For example:

\special{! /reset { 0 0 moveto} def}

5.3.4 PostScript hooks ¶

Besides including literal PostScript at a particular place in your document (as described in the previous section), you can also arrange to execute arbitrary PostScript code at particular times while the PostScript is printing.

If any of the PostScript names bop-hook, eop-hook, start-hook, or end-hook are defined in userdict, they will be executed at the beginning of a page, end of a page, start of the document, and end of a document, respectively.

When these macros are executed, the default PostScript coordinate system and origin is in effect. Such macros can be defined in headers added by the ‘-h’ option or the ‘header=’ special, and might be useful for writing, for instance, ‘DRAFT’ across the entire page, or, with the aid of a shell script, dating the document. These macros are executed outside of the save/restore context of the individual pages, so it is possible for them to accumulate information, but if a document must be divided into sections because of memory constraints, such added information will be lost across section breaks.

The single argument to bop-hook is the physical page number; the first page gets zero, the second one, etc. bop-hook must leave this number on the stack. None of the other hooks are passed arguments.

As an example of what can be done, the following special will write a light grey ‘DRAFT’ across each page in the document:

\special{!userdict begin /bop-hook{gsave 200 30 translate
65 rotate /Times-Roman findfont 216 scalefont setfont
0 0 moveto 0.7 setgray (DRAFT) show grestore}def end}

Using bop-hook or eop-hook to preserve information across pages breaks compliance with the Adobe document structuring conventions, so if you use any such tricks, you may also want to use the ‘-N’ option to turn off structured comments (such as ‘%%Page’). Otherwise, programs that read your file will assume its pages are independent.

5.3.5 Literal examples ¶

To finish off this section, the following examples of literal PostScript are presented without explanation:

\def\rotninety{\special{ps:currentpoint currentpoint translate 90
rotate neg exch neg exch translate}}\font\huge=cmbx10 at 14.4truept
\setbox0=\hbox to0pt{\huge A\hss}\vskip16truept\centerline{\copy0
\special{ps:gsave}\rotninety\copy0\rotninety\copy0\rotninety
\box0\special{ps:grestore}}\vskip16truept

\vbox to 2truein{\special{ps:gsave 0.3 setgray}\hrule height 2in
width\hsize\vskip-2in\special{ps:grestore}\font\big=cminch\big
\vss\special{ps:gsave 1 setgray}\vbox to 0pt{\vskip2pt
\line{\hss\hskip4pt NEAT\hss}\vss}\special{ps:0 setgray}%
\hbox{\raise2pt\line{\hss NEAT\hss}\special{ps:grestore}}\vss}

Some caveats are in order, however. Make sure that each gsave is matched with a grestore on the same page. Do not use save and restore; they can interact with the PostScript generated by Dvips if care is not taken. Try to understand what the above macros are doing before writing your own. The \rotninety macro especially has a useful trick that appears again and again.

5.4.1 Hypertext caveats ¶

If you intend to go all the way to PDF, you may want to use the standard 35 PostScript fonts exclusively, since other fonts are embedded as bitmaps by default. The Adobe PDF readers are extremely slow when dealing with bitmap fonts and the results look terrible on the screen. Printouts will probably look fine, but may not take full advantage of a high-resolution printer. Alternatively, you can have your fonts embedded as Type 1 scalable outlines. The resulting PostScript files may be larger, but can be effectively rasterized at any resolution. They can also be converted to PDF files that can be used effectively at any screen or printer resolution.

To get the TeX fonts embedded in the PostScript file as Type 1 fonts, add ‘-Ppdf’ to the dvips command line switches. The printout for a run should look something like this:

 dvips report -Ppdf -o report.ps
 This is dvips(k) 5.86 Copyright 1999 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
 ' TeX output 2001.06.15:0837' -> report.ps
 <tex.pro><alt-rule.pro><texc.pro><texps.pro><special.pro>. 
 <cmbx9.pfb><cmsy6.pfb><cmsy7.pfb><cmr5.pfb><cmex10.pfb><cmr9.pfb>
 <cmmi7.pfb><cmsy10.pfb><cmmib10.pfb><cmmi10.pfb><cmti10.pfb>
 <cmr7.pfb><cmbx10.pfb><cmr10.pfb><cmti9.pfb><cmr12.pfb><cmbx12.pfb>
 [1] [2<mean1.ps>] [3<bounce1-00.ps>] [4]

An entry like "<cmr10.pfb>" indicates success: dvips found the Computer Modern Roman 10 point font in a PostScript Font Binary file, translated it to an ASCII encoding, and embedded it. You can confirm this by examining the PostScript output file, looking for the section starting %%BeginFont: CMR10 followed by an entry /FontType 1 def.

The ‘-Ppdf’ option requires that the relevant outline (.pfa or .pfb) files be installed (see Font concepts). For example, the cmr10 file might be in /usr/share/texmf/fonts/type1/bluesky/cm/cmr10.pfb. Your TeX distribution may make those fonts available in a separate optional package (e.g., tetex-extra in Debian). Failing that, commercial versions of the Computer Modern fonts are available from Blue Sky; public domain versions, in particular, the lm and cm-super font families, are available from CTAN and in TeX distributions.

You can convert a PostScript file to PDF using distill, which comes with Adobe Acrobat, or ps2pdf, which comes with Ghostscript. The ps2pdf that comes with Ghostscript version 6.0 or earlier will not embed Type 1 fonts. Current recommendations are GNU Ghostscript 6.51 or Aladdin Ghostscript 7.0. You can check the fonts in a PDF file with Acrobat Reader by selecting the menu entries ‘File|Document Info|Fonts’.

Also, the Adobe distillers prior to 2.1 drop trailing space characters (character code 32) from strings. Unfortunately, the PostScript fonts use this character code for characters other than space (notably the Greek letter psi in the Symbol font), and so these characters are dropped. This bug is fixed in version 2.1.

If you can’t upgrade, one workaround is to change all the trailing blanks in strings to a character code that isn’t in the font. This works because the default behavior is to substitute a blank for a missing character, i.e., the distiller is fooled into substituting the right character. For instance, with the Blue Sky fonts, you can globally replace ‘ )’ with ‘\200)’ (with sed, for example) and get the desired result. With the public domain fonts, you will probably have to use a character code in the range 128 to 191 since these fonts duplicate the first 32 characters starting at 192 to avoid MS-DOS problems.

For more information on the use of TeX to produce PDF files, see the article “Creating quality Adobe PDF files from TeX with DVIPS” by Kendall Whitehouse of Adobe. Adobe seems not to offer the article any more, but copies are available elsewhere:

http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ralph/MathOnWeb/TeXPDF.html
http://www.utdallas.edu/~cantrell/online/543e.html

5.4.2 Hypertext specials ¶

Current support for the World Wide Web in the TeX system does not involve modifying TeX itself. We need only define some specials; Arthur Smith (apsmith@aps.org), Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Paul Ginsparg originally proposed and implemented the following:

html:<a href="xurl">
html:<a name="name">
html:</a>
html:<img src="xurl">
html:<base href="xurl">

Like all TeX \special’s, these produce no visible output, and are uninterpreted by TeX itself. They are instructions to DVI processors only.

Here, xurl is a standard WWW uniform resource locator (URL), possibly extended with a ‘#type.string’ construct, where type is ‘page’, ‘section’, ‘equation’, ‘reference’ (for bibliographic references), ‘figure’, ‘table’, etc. For example,

\special{html:<a href="http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~tim/ch1.dvi#equation.1.1">}

is a link to equation (1.1) in an example document by Tim Murphy.

See the URL http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Addressing.html for a precise description of base URL’s.

Descriptions of the \special’s:

‘href’ ¶

Creates links in your TeX document. For example:

\special{html:<a href="http://www.tug.org/">}\TeX\ Users
Group\special{html:</a>}

The user will be able to click on the text ‘TeX Users Group’ while running Xdvi and get to the TUG home page. (By the way, this is for illustration. In practice, you most likely want to use macros to insert the \special commands; reference above.)

‘name’ ¶

Defines URL targets in your TeX documents, so links can be resolved. For example:

\special{html:<a name="paradise">}Paradise\special{html:</a>}
is exactly where you are right now.

This will resolve an ‘href="#paradise"’. You’ll also have to change the catcode of ‘#’, etc. It’s usually easiest to use existing macro packages which take care of all the details, such as hyperref for LaTeX. The HyperTeX FAQ has more information.

‘img’ ¶

Links to an arbitrary external file. Interactively, a viewer is spawned to read the file according to the file extension and your mailcap file (see the Xdvi documentation).

‘base’ ¶

Defines a base URL that is prepended to all the name targets. Typically unnecessary, as the name of the DVI file being read is used by default.

The ‘img’ and ‘base’ tags are not yet implemented in Dvips or the NeXTSTEP DVI viewer.

6.1.1 Metric files ¶

A metric file describes properties of the font that are independent of what the characters actually look like. Aside from general information about the font itself, a metric file has two kinds of information: information about individual characters, organized by character code, and information about sequences of characters.

The per-character information specifies the width, height, depth, and italic correction of each character in the font. Any might be zero.

In addition to information on individual characters, the metric file specifies kerning, i.e., adding or removing space between particular character pairs. It further specifies ligature information: when a sequence of input characters should be typeset as a single (presumably different) “ligature” character. For example, it’s traditional for the input ‘fi’ to be typeset as ‘fi’, not as ‘fi’ (with the dot of the ‘i’ colliding with ‘f’). (In English, the only common ligatures are fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl.)

Different typesetting systems use different metric file formats:

• Each PostScript font has an Adobe font metrics (‘.afm’) file. These files are plain text, so you can inspect them easily. You can get AFM files for Adobe’s fonts from ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/Fonts/AFMs.
• TeX uses TeX font metrics (‘.tfm’) files. When you say ‘\font = font’ in your TeX document, TeX reads a file named ‘font.tfm’. (Well, except for the texfonts.map feature; see Fontmap in Kpathsea). TeX can then calculate the space occupied by characters from the font when typesetting. In addition, the DVI drivers you use to print or view the DVI file produced by TeX may need to look at the TFM file.

  TFM files are binary (and hence are typically much smaller than AFM files). You can use the tftopl program (see tftopl invocation in Web2c) that comes with TeX to transform a TFM file into a human-readable “property list” (‘.pl’) file. You can also edit a PL file and transform it back to a TeX-readable TFM with the companion program pltotf (see pltotf invocation in Web2c). Editing metrics by hand is not something you’re likely to want to do often, but the capability is there.

• ATM and other typesetting systems use printer font metric (‘.pfm’) files. These are binary files. They are irrelevant in the TeX world, and not freely available, so we will not discuss them further.

The Afm2tfm program distributed with Dvips converts an AFM file to a TFM file and performs other useful transformations as well. See Invoking Afm2tfm.

6.1.2 Glyph files ¶

Although a metric file (see the previous section) contains information about the spatial and other properties of the character at position 75, say, it contains nothing about what the character at position 75 actually looks like. The glyphs—the actual shapes of the letterforms in a font—are defined by other files, which we call glyph files. TeX itself only reads the TFM file for a font; it does not need to know character shapes.

A glyph file is a file that defines the shapes of the characters in a font. The shapes can be defined either by outlines or by bitmaps.

PostScript fonts are defined as outline fonts: Each character in the font is defined by giving the mathematical curves (lines, arcs, and splines) that define its contours. Different sizes of a character are generated by linearly scaling a single shape. For example, a 10-point ‘A’ is simply half the size of a 20-point ‘A’. Nowadays, outline fonts usually also contain hints—additional information to improve the appearance of the font at small sizes or low resolutions.

Although various kinds of PostScript outline fonts exist, by far the most common, and the only one we will consider, is called Type 1. The glyph files for PostScript Type 1 fonts typically have names ending in ‘.pfa’ (“printer font ASCII”) or ‘.pfb’ (“printer font binary”).

In contrast, glyph files for Computer Modern and the other standard TeX fonts are bitmap fonts, generated from Metafont (‘.mf’) descriptions. The Metafont program distributed with TeX generates bitmaps from these descriptions.

The glyph files for TeX bitmap fonts are usually stored in packed font (PK) files. The names of these files end in ‘.nnnpk’, where nnn is the resolution of the font in dots per inch. For example, cmr10.600pk contains the bitmaps for the ‘cmr10’ font at a resolution of 600dpi. (On DOS filesystems, it’s more likely dpi600\cmr10.pk.)

Metafont actually outputs generic font (GF) files, e.g., cmr10.600gf, but the GF files are usually converted immediately to PK format (using the gftopk utility that comes with TeX) since PK files are smaller and contain the same information. (The GF format is a historical artifact.)

6.1.3 Virtual fonts ¶

A virtual font is constructed by extracting characters from one or more existing fonts and rearranging them, or synthesizing new characters in various ways. The explanation in this manual is intended to suffice for understanding enough about virtual fonts to use them with Dvips. It isn’t a reference manual on virtual fonts. For more information: The primary document on virtual fonts is Donald E. Knuth, TUGboat 11(1), Apr. 1990, pp. 13–23, “Virtual Fonts: More Fun for Grand Wizards” (mirror.ctan.org/info/virtual-fonts.knuth). (Don’t be intimidated by the subtitle.)

A virtual font (‘.vf’) file specifies, for each character in the virtual font, a recipe for typesetting that character. A VF file, like a TFM file, is in a compressed binary format. The vftovp and vptovf programs convert a VF file to a human-readable VPL (virtual property list) format and back again. See vftovp invocation in Web2c, and vptovf invocation in Web2c.

In the case of a PostScript font f being used in a straightforward way, the recipe says: character i in the VF font is character j in font f. The font f is called a base font. For example, the VF file could remap the characters of the PostScript font to the positions where TeX expects to find them. See Encodings.

Since TeX reads only TFM files, not VF’s, each VF must have a corresponding TFM for use with TeX. This corresponding TFM is created when you run vptovf.

You can expand virtual fonts into their base fonts with DVIcopy (see dvicopy invocation in Web2c). This is useful if you are using a DVI translator that doesn’t itself understand vf’s.

If a virtual font has no entry at a given codepoint and the first MAPFONT designates an (u)pTeX JFM, we designate the glyph of the same codepoint in the TFM(JFM) with the smallest font ID. This feature helps to reduce the size of Japanese virtual fonts. For more information about the extensive support of Japanese in TeX, see https://github.com/texjporg.

6.1.4 Encodings ¶

Every font, whatever its type, has an encoding, that specifies the correspondence between “logical” characters and character codes. For example, the ASCII encoding specifies that the character numbered 65 (decimal) is an uppercase ‘A’. The encoding does not specify what the character at that position looks like; there are lots of ways to draw an ‘A’, and a glyph file (see Glyph files) tells how. Nor does it specify how much space that character occupies; that information is in a metric file (see Metric files).

TeX implicitly assumes a particular encoding for the fonts you use with it. For example, the plain TeX macro \', which typesets an acute accent over the following letter, assumes the acute accent is at position 19 (decimal). This happens to be true of standard TeX fonts such as Computer Modern, as you might expect, but it is not true of normal PostScript fonts.

It’s possible but painful to change all the macros that assume particular character positions. A better solution is to create a new font with the information for the acute accent at position 19, where TeX expects it to be. See Making a PostScript font available.

PostScript represents encodings as a sequence of 256 character names called an encoding vector. An encoding file (‘.enc’) gives such a vector, together with ligature and kerning information (with which we are not concerned at the moment). These encoding files are used by the Afm2tfm program. Encoding files are also downloaded to the PostScript interpreter in your printer if you use one of them in place of the default encoding vector for a particular PostScript font.

Examples of encodings: the dvips.enc encoding file that comes with the Fontname distribution (http://tug.org/fontname) is a good (but not perfect) approximation to the TeX encoding for TeX’s Computer Modern text fonts. This is the encoding of the fonts that originated with Dvips, such as ptmr.tfm. The distribution includes many other encoding files; for example, 8r.enc, which is the base font for the current PostScript font distribution, and three corresponding to the TeX mathematics fonts: texmext.enc for math extensions, texmital.enc for math italics, and texmsym.enc for math symbols.

6.1.5 Bitmap font encodings ¶

To dvips, bitmapped fonts do not have any notion of linguistics; they are simply a vector of glyphs. By comparison, PostScript fonts are required to contain an encoding vector that at least provides glyph names; these names can permit PostScript and PDF viewers to extract legible text from PostScript and PDF output.

Unlike previous versions, dvips versions 2020 and later add glyph naming information to Type 3 bitmapped fonts (if they can locate such information) as an Encoding vector. This provides some support for search, for copy and paste, and even some limited support for accessibility. The ‘bitmapfontenc’ command line option (see Option details and bitmapfontenc configuration option (see Configuration file commands) enable and disable this functionality; by default it is set to enabled, without warnings.

To do this, dvips must find encoding information for the bitmapped fonts. It does this by first searching for a font-specific encoding file; for instance, for cmr10, it will search for dvips-cmr10.enc in the standard encoding path. If it does not find such a file, it will search for a dvips-all.enc file which contains a base set of encodings for many fonts.

The specific syntax of an encoding file is unspecified, except that it must be a PostScript fragment that leaves exactly one object on the operand stack. (This is different from the encoding files used to define encodings for PostScript fonts, described earlier). Normally that object is just an array of 256 names; in this case, that array is used as the encoding vector for the font. Alternatively, the object can be a procedure that, when executed, leaves a legal encoding vector on the stack. This second option is made available to support future enhancements that may add additional constructs to the font dictionary to enhance the interpretation of font characters.

The dvips-all.enc file contains encodings for many fonts, and it is loaded by dvips at most once. The format is just a sequence of font names, one per line, each terminated by a colon, followed by the encoding to use for those files.

As part of its operation, to enable heuristics in PostScript and PDF viewers to properly identify word breaks and column gutters, dvips also generates a modified font bounding box and a modified font coordinate system.

6.1.6 How PostScript typesets a character ¶

The output of Dvips is a program in the PostScript language that instructs your (presumably PostScript-capable) printer how to typeset your document by transforming it into toner on paper. Your printer, in turn, contains a PostScript interpreter that carries out the instructions in this typesetting program.

The program must include the definition of any PostScript fonts that you use in your document. Fonts built into your printer (probably the standard 35: ‘Times-Roman’, ‘ZapfDingbats’, …) are defined within the interpreter itself. Other fonts must be downloaded as pfa or pfb files (see Glyph files) from your host (the computer on which you’re running Dvips).

You may be wondering exactly how a PostScript interpreter figures out what character to typeset, with this mass of metrics, glyphs, encodings, and other information. (If you’re not wondering, skip this section …)

The basic PostScript operator for imaging characters is show. Suppose you’ve asked TeX to typeset an ‘S’. This will eventually wind up in the Dvips output as the equivalent of this PostScript operation:

(S) show

Here is how PostScript typesets the ‘S’:

1. PostScript interpreters use ASCII; therefore ‘S’ is represented as the integer 83. (Any of the 256 possible characters representable in a standard 8-bit byte can be typeset.)
2. A PostScript dictionary is a mapping of names to arbitrary values. A font, to the interpreter, is a dictionary which contains entries for certain names. (If these entries are missing, the interpreter refuses to do anything with that font.)

   PostScript has a notion of “the current font”—whatever font is currently being typeset in.

3. One of the mandatory entries in a font dictionary is ‘Encoding’, which defines the encoding vector (see Encodings) for that font. This vector of 256 names maps each possible input character to a name.
4. The interpreter retrieves the entry at position 83 of the encoding vector. This value is a PostScript name: /S.
5. For Type 1 fonts (we’re not going to discuss anything else), the interpreter now looks up /S as a key in a dictionary named CharStrings, another mandatory entry in a font dictionary.
6. The value of S in CharStrings is the equivalent of a series of standard PostScript commands like ‘curveto’, ‘lineto’, ‘fill’, and so on. These commands are executed to draw the character. There can also be hint information that helps adapt the character to low-resolution rasters. (See Glyph files.) The commands are actually represented in a more compact way than standard PostScript source; see the Type 1 book for details.

This method for typesetting characters is used in both Level 1 and Level 2 PostScript. See the PostScript reference manuals for more information.

6.3.1 Changing font encodings ¶

Afm2tfm allows you to specify a different encoding for a PostScript font (for a general introduction to encodings, see Encodings). The ‘-t’ option changes the TeX encoding, ‘-p’ changes the PostScript encoding, and ‘-T’ changes both simultaneously, as detailed in the sections below.

• ‘-t’: Changing TeX encodings
• ‘-p’: Changing PostScript encodings
• ‘-T’: Changing both TeX and PostScript encodings
• Reencoding with Afm2tfm
• Encoding file format

zpopr Optima "MyEncoding ReEncodeFont" <myenc.enc

\def\H#1{{\accent"CD #1}}
\def\.#1{{\accent"C7 #1}}
\def\dot{\mathaccent"70C7 }
\newdimen\aadimen
\def\AA{\leavevmode\setbox0\hbox{h}\aadimen\ht0
  \advance\aadimen-1ex\setbox0\hbox{A}\rlap{\raise.67\aadimen
  \hbox to \wd0{\hss\char'27\hss}}A}

% Comments are ignored, unless the first word after the percent sign
% is ‘LIGKERN’; see below.
/MyEncoding [ % exactly 256 entries follow, each with a leading ‘/’
  /Alpha /Beta /Gamma /Delta ...
  /A /B ... /Z 
  ...  /.notdef /xfooaccent /yfooaccent /zfooaccent
] def

% LIGKERN || = 39 ;

=: |=: |=:> =:| =:|> |=:| |=:|> |=:|>>

% LIGKERN question quoteleft =: questiondown ;
% LIGKERN exclam quoteleft =: exclamdown ;
% LIGKERN hyphen hyphen =: endash ; endash hyphen =: emdash ;
% LIGKERN quoteleft quoteleft =: quotedblleft ;
% LIGKERN quoteright quoteright =: quotedblright ;
% LIGKERN space {} * ; * {} space ; 0 {} * ; * {} 0 ;
% LIGKERN 1 {} * ; * {} 1 ; 2 {} * ; * {} 2 ; 3 {} * ; * {} 3 ;
% LIGKERN 4 {} * ; * {} 4 ; 5 {} * ; * {} 5 ; 6 {} * ; * {} 6 ;
% LIGKERN 7 {} * ; * {} 7 ; 8 {} * ; * {} 8 ; 9 {} * ; * {} 9 ;

6.3.2 Special font effects ¶

Besides the reencodings described in the previous section, Afm2tfm can do other manipulations. (Again, it’s best to use the prebuilt fonts rather than attempting to remake them.)

‘-s slant’ makes an obliqued variant, as in:

afm2tfm Times-Roman -s .167 -v ptmro rptmro

This creates ptmro.vpl and rptmro.tfm. To use this font, put the line

rptmro Times-Roman ".167 SlantFont"

into psfonts.map. Then ‘rptmro’ (our name for the obliqued Times) will act as if it were a resident font, although it is actually constructed from Times-Roman via the PostScript routine SlantFont (which will slant everything 1/6 to the right, in this case).

Similarly, you can get an expanded font with

afm2tfm Times-Roman -e 1.2 -v ptmrre rptmrre

and by recording the pseudo-resident font

rptmrre Times-Roman "1.2 ExtendFont"

in psfonts.map.

You can also create a small caps font with a command such as

afm2tfm Times-Roman -V ptmrc rptmrc

This will generate a set of pseudo-small caps mapped into the usual lowercase positions and scaled down to 0.8 of the normal cap dimensions. You can also specify the scaling as something other than the default 0.8:

afm2tfm Times-Roman -c 0.7 -V ptmrc rptmrc

It is unfortunately not possible to increase the width of the small caps independently of the rest of the font. If you want a really professional looking set of small caps, you need to acquire a small caps font.

To change the PaintType in a font from filled (0) to outlined (2), you can add "/PaintType 2 store" to psfonts.map, as in the following:

rphvrl   Helvetica "/PaintType 2 store"

Afm2tfm writes to standard output the line you need to add to psfonts.map to use that font, assuming the font is resident in the printer; if the font is not resident, you must add the ‘<filename’ command to download the font. Each identical line only needs to be specified once in the ‘psfonts.map’ file, even though many different fonts (small caps variants, or ones with different output encodings) may be based on it.

6.3.3 Afm2tfm options ¶

Synopsis:

afm2tfm [option]... afmfile[.afm] [tfmfile[.tfm]]

Afm2tfm reads afmfile and writes a corresponding (but “raw”, see below) TFM file. If tfmfile is not supplied, the base name of the AFM file is extended with ‘.tfm’ to get the output filename.

The simplest example:

afm2tfm Times-Roman rptmr

The TFM file thus created is raw because it omits ligature and kern information, and does no character remapping; it contains only the character information in the AFM file in TFM format, which is the form that TeX understands. The characters have the same code in the TFM file as in the AFM file. For text fonts, this means printable ASCII characters will work ok, but little else, because standard PostScript fonts have a different encoding scheme than the one that plain TeX expects (see Encodings). Although the encodings agree for most printable ASCII characters, other characters such as ligatures and accents vary. Thus, in practice, it’s almost always desirable to create a virtual font as well with the ‘-v’ or ‘-V’ option. See Making a PostScript font available.

The command line options to Afm2tfm:

‘-a’ ¶

By default, Afm2tfm looks for precomposed accented characters, such as tdieresis, and possibly adjusts the height of the basic letter (t) upward so that the result of using \accent (as in \"t) is visually the same as the precomposed characters. The -a option omits such adjustments, so that all characters’ heights remain as they are given in the AFM file. (Until Afm2tfm 8.4, released in 2016, heights could also be adjusted downward, but this is no longer the case.)

‘-c ratio’ ¶

See ‘-V’; overrides the default ratio of 0.8 for the scaling of small caps.

‘-e ratio’ ¶

Stretch characters horizontally by ratio; if less than 1.0, you get a condensed font.

‘-O’ ¶

Output all character codes in the ‘vpl’ file as octal numbers, not names; this is useful for symbol or other special-purpose fonts where character names such as ‘A’ have no meaning.

‘-p ps-enc’ ¶

Use ps-enc for the destination (PostScript) encoding of the font; ps-enc must be mentioned as a header file for the font in ‘psfonts.map’. See ‘-p’: Changing PostScript encodings.

‘-s slant’ ¶

Slant characters to the right by slant. If slant is negative, the letters slope to the left (or they might be upright if you start with an italic font).

‘-t tex-enc’ ¶

Use tex-enc for the target (TeX) encoding of the font. Ligature and kern information may also be specified in file. file is not mentioned in psfonts.map.

‘-T ps-tex-enc’ ¶

Use ps-tex-enc for both the PostScript and target TeX encodings of the font. Equivalent to ‘-p file -t file’.

‘-u’ ¶

Use only those characters specified in the TeX encoding, and no others. By default, Afm2tfm tries to include all characters in the input font, even those not present in the TeX encoding (it puts them into otherwise-unused positions, arbitrarily).

‘-v vpl-file’ ¶

Output a VPL (virtual property list) file, as well as a TFM file.

‘-V vpl-file’ ¶

Same as ‘-v’, but the virtual font generated is a pseudo small caps font obtained by scaling uppercase letters by 0.8 to typeset lowercase. This font handles accented letters and retains proper kerning.

7.6.1 Color specifications ¶

What is a color specification? One of three things. First, it might be a PostScript procedure as defined in a PostScript header file. The color.pro file defines 64 of these, including ‘Maroon’. This PostScript procedure must set the current color to be some value; in this case, ‘Maroon’ is defined as ‘0 0.87 0.68 0.32 setcmykcolor’.

The second possibility is the name of a color model (initially, one of ‘rgb’, ‘hsb’, ‘cmyk’, or ‘gray’) followed by the appropriate number of parameters. When Dvips encounters such a macro, it sends out the parameters first, followed by the string created by prefixing ‘TeXcolor’ to the color model. Thus, the color specification ‘rgb 0.3 0.4 0.5’ would generate the PostScript code ‘0.3 0.4 0.5 TeXrgbcolor’. Note that the case of zero arguments is disallowed, as that is handled by the single keyword case (‘Maroon’) above, where no changes to the name are made before it is sent to the PostScript file.

The third and final type of color specification is a double quote followed by any sequence of PostScript. The double quote is stripped from the output. For instance, the color specification ‘"AggiePattern setpattern’ will set the ‘color’ to the Aggie logo pattern (assuming such exists.)

7.6.2 Color specials ¶

We will describe ‘background’ first, since it is the simplest. The ‘background’ keyword must be followed by a color specification. That color specification is used as a fill color for the background. The last ‘background’ special on a page is the one that gets issued, and it gets issued at the very beginning of the page, before any text or specials are sent. (This is possible because the prescan phase of Dvips notices all of the color specials so that the appropriate information can be written out during the second phase.)

The ‘color’ special itself has three forms. The first is just ‘color’ followed by a color specification. In this case, the current global color is set to that color; the color stack must be empty when such a command is executed.

The second form is ‘color push’ followed by a color specification. This saves the current color on the color stack and sets the color to be that given by the color specification. This is the most common way to set a color.

The final version of the ‘color’ special is just ‘color pop’, with no color specification; this says to pop the color last pushed on the color stack from the color stack and set the current color to be that color.

Dvips correctly handles these color specials across pages, even when the pages are repeated or reversed.

These color specials can be used for things such as patterns or screens as well as simple colors. However, note that in the PostScript, only one color specification can be active at a time. For instance, at the beginning of a page, only the bottommost entry on the color stack is sent; also, when a color is popped, all that is done is that the color specification from the previous stack entry is sent. No ‘gsave’ or ‘grestore’ is used. This means that you cannot easily mix usage of the ‘color’ specials for screens and colors, just one or the other. This may be addressed in the future by adding support for different categories of color-like state.