MDVI - A DVI previewer for Unix

MDVI - A free, high quality DVI previewer for TeX

MDVI's page on SourceForge
This is the place to go to report bugs, subscribe to the mailing lists, post messages to MDVI's forum, request features, etc.
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Status
Features
Requirements
Additional packages

Status

MDVI aims to provide a library that can be used to implement DVI drivers easily. A DVI driver is included, and uses the X Window System to display files. However, MDVI is in its very early stages of development. In fact, as of this writing (May 2001), it is less than four months old. You will probably find things that don't work as they should, or that simply don't work at all. Please consider taking the time to report them.

Most of the current work on MDVI is in the correctness of the output, rather than on fancy features of the viewer proper. If you find a DVI file that does not display correctly, please report that as a bug and submit a sample file that triggers the problem.

Features

Any magnification is allowed (although some magnifications may not be supported by your font installation).
Independent vertical and horizontal resolutions and scaling factors.
Rulers to measure distances on the screen.
Builtin support for fonts in PK, GF, VF and OVF formats
Support for PostScript Type1 fonts, using the t1lib library
Support for TrueType fonts, using FreeType 1.x
Builtin support for font metrics files in TFM, AFM, OFM-0 and OFM-1 formats. These are used as a last resort, so MDVI can display a box with the right dimensions, or skip over the right distance, when a font is missing.
Ability to partially read a DVI file, including a powerful mechanism to select the `interesting' pages from a file.
Several ways of sorting pages, by DVI or TeX page numbers.
Customizable via environment variables and a global `texmf.cnf' file
Can display DVI files in 8 different orientations
Supports antialiasing and high-quality shrinking when using Type1 or TrueType fonts
Font support can be completely configured from the command line (i.e. what font formats to recognize and in what order to look for them).
MDVI can use external Type1 fonts and metric files (from an existing Ghostscript installation or from X11)
Limited support for color \specials.
MDVI will try very hard to display files even if some fonts are missing. In fact, it will try much harder than other popular DVI viewers.

Omissions

The features that MDVI currently lacks, but which we expect to implement soon, are:

Display of PostScript \specials: Currently MDVI only displays the bounding box of figures included with the EPSF \special.
Transparent glyphs: This is mostly due to the limitations of X11.
Support for X resource files (viewer only).
Zooming: This effect can still be achieved by changing the scaling factor of glyphs (with the `x', `y' and `s' keys) or by changing the resolution.
Could be a lot faster.

Requirements

An ANSI C compiler

GNU Make
The kpathsea library, which is part of the Web2C TeX system. If you use a TeX distribution not based on kpathsea, you can install it separately. See below
To use Type1 fonts, the t1lib library
To use TrueType fonts, the FreeType library (version 1.x)
If you want to use Type1 or TrueType fonts, you need to have PostScript font maps and encoding files. These are distributed with dvips or pdftex, so if you have one of those programs, you should have these files

Additional Packages

For your downloading conveniencce, all the packages used by MDVI can be downloaded from this page:

REQUIRED The kpathsea library: Local copy
This is a stripped-down version of the web2c-7.3.3 package containing only the kpathsea library. DO NOT INSTALL THIS if you have a working version (even an earlier one) of kpathsea already installed, or your entire TeX system may stop working. You have been warned.
Note: If you want to use TrueType fonts, you need at least version 3.2 of kpathsea.
The t1lib library: Official site Local copy
The Freetype library: Official site Local copy
Fonts: These are available from many sites on the net and should be pretty easy to find. One source I use is CTAN, where you can find TrueType and PostScript fonts, as well as metric files in several formats. A local copy of the TrueType fonts from CTAN is also available.
Note: To use Type1 or TrueType fonts, you need to get the font maps and encodings distributed with dvips and PDFTeX. Packages with only the necessary files are available locally: dvips-config.tar.gz and pdftex-config.tar.gz. I recommend that you get them from their official source, however, because my copies are probably out of date.