dvi2bitmap

This page is the distribution point for dvi2bitmap.

This is version 1.0. I have no developments planned for after v1.0.

URL: the URL of the dvi2bitmap project is http://purl.org/nxg/dist/dvi2bitmap; please quote this URL, rather than the URL it resolves to.

DOWNLOAD from the Sourceforge project summary page

There's a low-volume mailing list for dvi2bitmap announcements and, possibly, discussion: dvi2bitmap-users

Documentation

• User documentation in html
• Library API documentation

Features

dvi2bitmap is a utility to convert TeX DVI files directly to bitmaps, without going through the complicated (and slow!) route of conversion via PostScript and PNM. The prime motivation for this is to prepare mathematical equations for inclusion in HTML files, but there is a broad range of uses beyond that.

• dvi2bitmap is written in portable C++, and the program acts as a wrapper round the libdvi2bitmap library (both static and shareable), which abstracts DVI and PK files and their contents, Bitmaps, and various other objects supporting these. The library has extensive API documentation, and is intended to be useful for other projects.
• It consists of a C++ library plus an application which uses it. The library provides a useful object model of DVI and PK files.
• It can generate XBM, XPM and GIF bitmaps, plus PNG, if you have the libpng library installed.
• Uses the same kpathsea font-searching library as other TeX programs, again as long as you have the appropriate library installed.
• Can read DVI files from a pipe.
• Internal bitmaps now automatically expandable.
• It's fast
• Builds using automake/libtool, so is broadly portable (it has in the past built successfully on Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, and Digital Unix (that I know of); it should (?!) be buildable under Cygwin (reports keenly appreciated).
• Released under the GPL

Notes

• There are font samples to illustrate what dvi2bitmap can do.
• The software is copyright, 1999--2005, Council of the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils, and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence: see the file LICENCE within the distribution.
• From 2005 onwards, the code is copyright Norman Gray, and also released under the terms of the GPL.
• dvi2bitmap is also archived in CTAN, at tex-archive/dviware/dvi2bitmap

Authors

Original author: Norman Gray. Contributions and patches from: Peter Draper (various fixes), Yoshihiro Okumura (MinGW patches), Jerry James (remove several -Wall warnings) ...to whom, many thanks! The source code has been through a number of different repositories in its time, so some details may have got lost: if you've contributed material or fixes to dvi2bitmap and I haven't acknowledged it, please accept my apologies and let me know.

This package was first released informally back in 1999, after a low-key announcement on comp.text.tex (I think), with a 1.0 version number. That's inappropriate for beta software, so in the first proper release, the version number was dropped to 0.7.