Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) (Tools and Techniques

10.2. Portable Document Format 237
Where Adobe makes its money is in the sales of programs to produce
and manipulate PDF files. Of these, the main ones are:
• Acrobat Distiller to convert PostScript into PDF, and
• Acrobat program to modify existing PDF files.
In the latter case, ‘modification’ means adding links, changing colors,
including navigational aids, and inserting notes; it does not mean altering
the actual textual content in any way.
Today most graphical and text processing programs are capable of
generating PDF output. For the L AT E X user, there are three routes that
may be taken to produce PDF output. The obvious one is.tex →.dvi →
.ps → .pdf using dvips to generate the PostScript and then Distiller or
Ghostscript to create the PDF file.
The other two methods are to employ a DVI-to-PDF driver, or the pdfT E X
program to go directly to PDF, by-passing the intermediate DVI output.
We describe each of these in the next sections.
Used on their own, all of these methods produce a simple PDF file
containing nothing more than the text itself, a sort of electronic paper.
The hypertext features that make an electronic document really live can
be added automatically with the help of the hyperref package described
in Section 10.2.4.
10.2.2 The dvipdfm driver
The driver program dvipdfm by Mark A. Wicks is the equivalent of dvips
for PDF output. As its name implies, it converts DVI to PDF output. (The
m suffix is to distinguish it from a previously announced dvipdf program
that never came to fruition.)
Graphics input can be included with the graphics or graphicx packages
(Section 6.1) by specifying the option dvipdfm. The allowed graphics
formats are JPEG, PNG, and PDF.
The program is called from a command line with
dvipdfm myfile
to convert myfile.dvi to myfile.pdf. As for dvips, there are many
options that may be included. It is best to read the provided manual in
dvipdfm.pdf or dvipdfm.dvi, or produce it by processing dvipdfm.tex
with T E X.
The configuration is set up by means of a file named config in the
dvipdfm directory. This is set up similarly to the config.ps file for
dvips, including the list of mapping files, although these have a different
syntax to those of dvips.
Hypertext features and other PDF additions can be added with the
hyperref package (Section 10.2.4).