[Tikzdevice-bugs] Problems with DVI

[Sharpie]

On Friday, April 29, 2011 3:56:20 AM UTC-7, arnyeinstein wrote:
>
> Hi
> I just starting using tikzdevice and it works fine when I use latex to pdf. 
> However if  I generate a dvi-file and want to have a look at it using Yap 
> (Miktex 2.9 on Windows 7), Yap crashes without error messages. I tried 
> simple examples but all cause crashes of Yap. Any idea what is going wrong?
> Renger
>

Hi Renger,

The TikZ package composes pictures by inserting what are known as "specials" 
into the DVI output. These special commands only have meaning when rendered 
into Postscript or PDF.  Therefore, a DVI viewer such as Yap will not be 
able to show any meaningful output.

There is a way to configure the package such that it produces "perfectly 
portable DVI output", but the manual entry on this shows how limited 
graphics in DVI are without support for specials:

The driver will produce perfectly portable .dvi files by composing all 
pictures entirely of black rectangles, the basic and only graphic shape 
supported by the TEX core. Even straight, but slanted lines are tricky to 
get right in this model (they need to be composed of lots of little 
squares).

Naturally, very little is possible with this driver. In fact, so little is 
possible that it is easier to list what is possible: 
   
   - Text boxes can be placed in the normal way.


   - Lines and curves can be drawn (stroked). If they are not horizontal or 
   vertical, they are composed of hundred of small rectangles. 


   - Lines of different width are supported.


   - Transformations are supported. 


Note that, say, even filling is not supported! (Let alone color or anything 
fancy.)

This driver has only one real application: It might be useful when you only 
need horizontal or vertical lines in a picture. Then, the results are quite 
satisfactory.

I know Yap is nice because of it's speed, but I'm afraid there is not much 
that can be done about this---advanced graphics are beyond the core 
capabilities of the DVI format.

-Charlie