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DVI vs. PDF

With some of the recent messages, I thought I should point out why the DVI is sometimes larger, and why I'm still using it. It's an old format, and never intended to support huge graphics(a 200K JPG is huge, compared to what EPS was designed for), but it has several advantages over PDF.

1. It's free. As in, not proprietary. This isn't as big a deal to me as it is to some people, but LaTeX pedants insist on using the DVI. I could argue about the whole PostScript patent issue, and how PDF isn't nearly as bad, but this isn't the time or the place.

2. It handles fonts better than PDF. I haven't run into font issues at the moment, because I've concentrated on layout and content. But the PDF distiller sucks at handling anything except Type-1 fonts. Admittedly, Type-1 fonts seem superior in every way to Type-3 fonts, but hey... just in case... Fortunately for me, most of the old Type-3 fonts have been converted to Type-1 by now. These problems have mostly been solved, but I could probably stand to update my LaTeX files... just yesterday I discovered that my Thumbnail generator was 18 months out of date.

3. The view updates the file automatically. This is the major reason, as it allows me to edit everything more easily, in a fashion resembling WYSIWYG development, but without the formatting headaches. I rarely need it, but it can be a real timesaver for me.

To sum up, yes, it's a bit odd. But there's ways around the image problem, I'm sure... Lee seems to have no problem keeping his DVI files to a manageable size, so maybe I'm doing something wrong. In any case, I expect I'll eventually be removing them from the page soon, as space becomes more of an issue. One less thing for me to worry about, and the PDF files support thumbnails and bookmarks and all that neat stuff.

- Andrew