DVI previewers

EmTeX for PCs running MS-DOS or OS/2, MiKTeX and XEmTeX for PCs running Windows and OzTeX for the Macintosh, all come with previewers that can be used on those platforms. EmTeX’s previewer can also be run under Windows 3.1.

Commercial PC TeX packages (see commercial vendors) have good previewers for PCs running Windows, or for Macintoshes.

For Unix systems, there is one “canonical” viewer, xdvi. Xdvik is a version of xdvi using the web2c libraries; it is now built from the same distribution as xdvi. The TeX Live distributions for Unix systems include a version of xdvik.

Alternatives to previewing include

• conversion to “similar” ASCII text (see converting to ASCII) and using a conventional text viewer to look at that,
• generating a PostScript version of your document and viewing it with a ghostscript-based previewer (see previewing PostScript files), and
• generating PDF output, and viewing that with Acrobat Reader or one of the substitutes for that.

FAQ ID: Q-previewers