DVII (TeX DVI file Information utility)

• Introduction
• Download executables or source code
  (Current version: 0.44 [02 May 2002])
• Sample output
• What's new (18-Apr-2007)
• dvii user manual
• 2002 TUGboat article on dvii

(See the TUG (TeX User's Group) website for more information on TeX.)
Please also visit my page of useful and free TeX/LaTeX utilities.

Introduction

dvii is a free utility that extracts information from a TeX dvi file. Information displayed can include a summary:

• File comment (usually the date file was compiled)
• File size
• Number of (physical) pages
• Number of fonts

as well as more detailed information:

• Font names for all fonts used
• List of physical page number/TeX page number pairs
• List of all \specials and the page on which they appear
• List of all fonts on a per page basis

For a sample of dvii's output, see the sample output page.

Note that dvii does not alter the dvi file in any way, or create or modify any other files on your system; it is a 'read only' utility.

Furthermore, installing dvii consists of copying a single executable. Removing it means simply removing that single executable. No uninstall program needed! If you do not find an executable at this site for your platform, dvii is written in portable C so you can download the source and compile it yourself.

Design Goals

This utility is designed with the following goals in mind:

• it should be fast, faster than dvitype
• it should be easy to use the output as a back end to Perl (or other text processing language), enabling the easy manipulation of the data for more specific purposes
• it should be useful to the TeX community
• it should be portable
• it should small and easy to install/uninstall

In light of these goals, I encourage all those who use it to send me bug reports, and/or comments and suggestions on how it can be improved. In particular, I am interested on making this program compile on as many different platforms as possible, so if you have compiling problems, please let me know.

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What's New

18 April 2007 Fixed problem with links in the Perl scripts section.

4 January 2005 Updated information in section Executables section below for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

15 May 2003 Added information about Adobe Acrobat's Document compare feature which performs the same sort of function as changes.pl; see the perl scripts section below for more information.

19 April 2003 Added a link to 2002 TUGboat article on dvii.

1 December 2002 Added binaries for Macintosh OSX (donated by Art Werschulz) and OpenBSD (Intel) (donated by Timothy Eyre).

17 August 2002 Page change utility (changes.pl). Tells you on which pages two dvi files differ. See the Perl script section. Updated user manual. Also made the cygwin DLL available for download directly from this site.

2 May 2002 Version 0.44. Added the -P option to suppress the display of physical pages, as well as an additional ignore option when calculating per-page checksums. Updated user manual.

18 December 2001 Fixed some small bugs in the font difference utility (fontdiff.pl) and added documentation for the Perl scripts to the dvii user manual.

23 September 2001 Font difference utility (fontdiff.pl). Tells you how two dvi files differ relative to fonts. See the Perl script section.

25 March 2001 Version 0.41. Small internal changes.

25 February 2001 Version 0.40. First version with fonts per page feature.

25 January 2001 Version 0.32. Changed output format of font checksum to pad checksums that are fewer than 8 characters.

26 April 2000 Version 0.31. Fixed nasty bug causing parsing problems; please upgrade to this version!

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Executables and source code

The current version of dvii is "0.44 (02 May 2002)".

Source code

You can download the file dvii.c; here is the README file which gives more information on compiling and installation.

Executables

(Under construction) Included below are a few executables. Please let me know of any that do not work. To install, simply rename the file to 'dvii.exe' (under DOS or Windows) or 'dvii' (under Unix) and place somewhere in your PATH.

Note. Some of the executables have been supplied by others and have not been tested by me; those are marked with a *.

• DOS dvii_dos.exe (version 0.31) Runs under plain old DOS (as well as Windows).
• Windows (Windows 9X/ME/NT/2000/XP)
  • [WIN32] dvii_win32.exe (version 0.44) This runs under Windows 9X/ME/NT/2000/XP. It is not as fast as the WIN32/cygwin version (see next), but at least you only need this one file!
  • [WIN32/cygwin] dvii_win32_cw.exe (version 0.44) This will run under Windows 9X/ME/NT/2000/XP, but only if you have the cygwin DLL. It is significantly faster than dvii_win32.exe.
• Macintosh
  • [MacOSX] dvii_macosx (version 0.44) For Jaguar (version 10.2) Mac OS X (to be run from the command line).
• Linux
  • [Intel] dvii_linux_intel_dynamic.exe (version 0.44) For Linux on Intel (requires that the the C libraries be installed). Note: tested on Red Hat Linux 7.1 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.
  • [Intel] dvii_linux_intel_static.exe (version 0.44) For Linux on Intel (does not require that the C libraries be installed (bigger!)). Note: tested on Red Hat Linux 7.1 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.
• OpenBSD
  • [Intel] *dvii_openbsd_intel.exe Note: only tested on OpenBSD 3.1. Compiled and supplied by Timothy Eyre.
• Solaris
  • [Intel] dvii_solaris_intel.exe (version 0.??) For the Solaris x86 (Intel) platform.
  • [Sparc] dvii_solaris_sparc.exe (version 0.44) For the Solaris Sparc platform.
• Sun 4
  • [Sparc] dvii_sunos414_classic.exe (version ??) For the Sun 4 Sparc platform. (Warning: this is a rather old version of dvii.)
• OSF1 Alpha
  • dvii_OSF1_alpha.exe (version ??) For the OSF1 system using the Alpha chip.
• Wanted!
  • Updated versions for DOS, OSF/Alpha, Solaris/Intel, Sun4.
  • A faster stand-alone WIN32 version

Perl scripts

These Perl scripts use dvii as a backend to accomplish various useful tasks. More information on these utilities can be found in the appendix to the dvii manual.

• changes.pl (right-click on the link and choose to save the file)

  Specify two dvi files and this utility tells you on which pages the files are different using the page checksum feature of dvii. This script requires the diff utility (available on most Unix platforms and for the Windows platforms with the cygwin distribution).

  Note: I just discovered that Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the freely available Acrobat Reader) has a compare feature that allows one to compare two .pdf files page-by-page to spot differences in words, or words and fonts, or even pixel differences. I found this feature in version 4.05.

• fontdiff.pl (right-click on the link and choose to save the file)

  Specify two dvi files and this utility tells you the font differences, a bit like the diff utility. Click here for more information on the fontdiff utility.

• specials.pl (right-click on the link and choose to save the file)

  Output a dvips-style list of all pages containing a \special. Very useful for printing just those pages of a document with an included figure. For example, if the file test.dvi has specials on pages 3, 4, and 7, the command perl specials.prl test.dvi would output the string -pp3,4,7

  You can also give the option --grep text which indicates to the Perl script to list only those pages which have specials containing the supplied text. For example, if you wanted a page list of all those pages containing a special which loads a PSfile, you could type specials --grep PSfile file.dvi. (Note: the --grep option is case-sensitive.)

• Any requests? Send me a Perl script, or even an idea for a Perl script that uses dvii and I will put it here.

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(Last changed: 18-April-2007)

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