Ghostview and Ghostscript

Ghostview

In government and industry the commercial Adobe Acrobat page description (PDF) language appears to be gaining ascendancy. Among the academics, however, postscript (a predecessor of PDF) continues to be the medium of exchange, with .dvi and .html formatted files following at some distance.

It is my belief, subject to correction of course, that the postscript format became popular in academia because of the availability of very good dvi-to-postscript utilities such as dvips. DVI (device independent) files are the output of LaTeX and are small, compared to other formats, including postscript. However they cannot contain postscript graphics, and graphics are often integral to the technical or scientific paper. If there aren't any such graphics, however, dvi viewer/printer software (e.g., YAP - "Yet Another Previewer) packages are available, usually as part of the LaTeX distribution.

If postscript graphics are included, the viewer/printer software, such as Ghostview, works nicely. Ghostview can also read .pdf files and it has been my experience that it hangs less often. As always, your mileage may vary.

Postscript is, technically, a commercial product as well, but the open source people have written interpreters and format conversion routines to make its use as a page description language fairly straightforward. Further, using open source software such as Ghostview, an expensive postscript-capable printer is no longer necessary. For example, I use my ancient HP LaserJet IIP+ to print postscript documents easily.