Generating PostScript and PDF Documents

PS and PDF documents are generated by so-called drivers. The name of the driver is to be specified as an option in the following notes: Figures, Colours, PDF Hyper References. The listed commands are compulsory for the given driver.

Driver: dvips

• First variant:

  latex <file>.tex
  dvips -Ppdf -G0 -o <file>.ps <file>.dvi
  ps2pdf -dPDFsettings=/prepress -o <file>.pdf <file>.ps
  

• Second variant:

  latex <file>.tex
  dvipdf <file>.tex
  

Driver: pdftex

  pdflatex <file>.tex

Driver: dvipdfm

• Plain:

  latex <file>.tex
  dvipdfm <file>.dvi
  

• With thumbnails:

  latex <file>.tex
  dvipdfm -e -z0 <file>.dvi
  gs -r10 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=png256 -sOutputFile=<file>.%d <file>.pdf
  dvipdfm <file>
  

Useful hints

How to tell apart pdftex and other drivers:

\ifx\pdftexversion\undefined
    \usepackage[dvips]{graphics} %\usepackage[dvipdfm]{graphics}
else
    \usepackage[pdftex]{graphics}
fi

See Compiling LaTeX Documents and PDF Bookmarks