Configuring dvi intrepreters

Obtaining glyph files

dvi intrepreters like dvips translate the instructions in a .dvi file into a language, like postscript, understood by display devices like printers. Since an intrepreter needs to instruct the display device how to actually produce the the page, it needs to know how to draw each glyph. Such information resides in .pfa (Unix) or .pfb (Windows) files, or in the POST resources of so-called printer font files (Macintosh). Most any version of dvips can understand both .pfa and .pfb files, and the most common Macintosh versions of dvips (including those accompanying OzTeX and CMacTeX) can also understand the POST resources of Macintosh printer fonts.

Configuring dvips

dvips now need only be told where to find the file describing the glyphs for any font -- that is any .tfm file -- that might appear in a .dvi file. It looks for this information in the file psfonts.map, where a line such as 
 garrm garrm "T1Encoding ReencodeFont" <T1.enc <garrm.pfa
tells it that whenever the font described by garrm.tfm in a .dvi file is used, it should obtain the glyph information from garrm.pfa. If you your system stores glyph shapes in garrm.pfb or GaramondRoman instead, just replace garrm.pfa by the appropriate file name. The words "T1Encoding ReencodeFont" and the reference to T1.enc tell dvips that, when a .dvi file requests character 20, it should use the encoding vector described in the file T1.enc to determine the number of the corresponding character in the garrm.pfa file. Therefore the relevant .enc files must also be available to dvips.

Configuring dvi viewers

While the dvips utility is the near-universal tool for producing postscript from TeX, there are a multitude of on-screen dvi viewers. Each viewer has its own configuration file whose entries map TeX fonts (.tfm files) to real fonts (glyph descriptions) and an encoding vectors. While the name of the configuration file and the syntax for its entries varies from viewer to viewer, you should be able to figure it out by reading the manual for your TeX installation and looking at the existing entries. Note that most dvi viewers which run under Windows and MacOS require the postscript fonts they should display to be installed under the operating system.

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