4 Reference guide

4.1 Settings

Current settings are saved each time you quit in a windvi.cnf file. This file is located under the HOME directory if this environment variable is set, or under c:\ otherwise.

You can have a site-wide windvi.cnf file located in $TEXMFCNF/windvi.cnf. This file will be read before the user one and settings will be merged.

4.2 Logging

Any error or informational message will make the log window pop up. Font generation and so on is displayed in real-time.

There is no way currently to avoid the pop-up feature.

4.3 Features

4.3.1 General features

All the features of Windvi are documented in this sample file. You are encouraged to look at it.

4.3.2 Postscript inclusions

Windvi will allow you to preview many PostScript inclusions, including raw PostScript specials. See the Examples/wtest.tex file for examples. The bop / eop feature found in dvips is not yet supported.

Most of the features available are described in the document Examples/wtest.tex.

However, there is a drawback. The ghostscript interpreter will allow the whole page at the requested scaling factor to do its job. That means a color page on a 24bits device, A4 size at 600dpi will be as huge as 34Mb. This is enough to make your W9x crash. NT won't crash but will slow down a lot and may become unusable.

Eventually, PostScript visualization will be turned off automatically if it is detected that ghostscript will use too much memory.

4.3.3 Colors

Windvi will honor color specials as introduced either by colordvi (plain TeX) or color package (LaTeX).

However, it is recommended to use this feature on true color devices. That means at least 32768 colors available.

On 256 colors devices, no antialiasing is done for color text. Moreover, the rendering maybe wrong because of the low number of colors available.

4.4 Printing

Currently, printing works provided that you used the right command line options to run windvi. The options needed are the metafont mode for your printer and the base dpi number. Once you have run it with the right parameters, they will be saved in your windvi.cnf file so no need to bother for them again, unless you change your printer. For example :

will allow you to print at 720dpi on an Epson Stylus printer.

The file holding the modes is texmf/metafont/misc/modes.mf and if you ever change it, you might want to rebuild your METAFONTformats using fmtutil.

This will be made obsolete (or almost) by the forthcoming support for Type1 and TTF fonts.

4.5 Command line options

+<page>

Specifies the first page to show. If + is given without a number, the last page is assumed; the first page is the default.

-allowshell

This option enables the shell escape in PostScript specials. (For security reasons, shell escapes are disabled by default.) This option should be rarely used; in particular it should not be used just to uncompress files: that function is done automatically if the file name ends in .Z or .gz . Shell escapes are always turned off if the -safer option is used.

-altfont <font>

Declares a default font to use when the font in the dvi file cannot be found. This is useful, for example, with PostScript fonts. Defaults to cmr10

-background <color>

uses <color> as background color

-bg <color>

same as -background

-debug <bitmask>

If nonzero, prints additional information on standard output. The number is taken as a set of independent bits. The meaning of each bit follows. 1=bitmaps; 2=dvi translation; 4=pk reading; 8=batch operation; 16=events; 32=file opening; 64=PostScript communication; 128=Kpathsea stat(2) calls; 256=Kpathsea hash table lookups; 512=Kpathsea path definitions; 1024=Kpathsea path expansion; 2048=Kpathsea searches. To trace everything having to do with file searching and opening, use 4000. Some of these debugging options are actually provided by Kpathsea. See the `Debugging' section in the Kpathsea manual.

-density <density>

Determines the density used when shrinking bitmaps for fonts. A higher value produces a lighter font. The default value is 40. For monochrome displays; for color displays, use -gamma. See also the `S' keystroke. Same as -S.

-foreground <color>

Uses <color> as foreground color

-fg <color>

same as -foreground

-gamma <gamma>

Controls the interpolation of colors in the greyscale anti-aliasing color palette. Default value is 1.0. For 0 < gamma < 1, the fonts will be lighter (more like the background), and for gamma > 1, the fonts will be darker (more like the foreground). Negative values behave the same way, but use a slightly different algorithm. For color and grayscale displays; for monochrome, see -density. For color and greyscale displays; for monochrome, see -density. See also the `S' keystroke.

-geometry <string>

Specifies an initial X-Window geometry string.

-grid1 <color>

Determines the color of level 1 grid (default as foreground)

-grid2 <color>

Determines the color of level 2 grid (default as foreground)

-grid3 <color>

Determines the color of level 3 grid (default as foreground)

-gspalette <palette>

Specifies the palette to be used when using Ghostscript for rendering PostScript specials. Possible values are

• Color,
• Greyscale,
• Monochrome.

The default is Color.

-gsalpha

Causes Ghostscript to be called with anti-aliasing enabled in PostScript figures, for a nicer appearance. It is available on newer versions of Ghostscript.

-hush

Causes Windvi to suppress all suppressible warnings.

-hushchars

Causes Windvi to suppress warnings about references to characters which are not defined in the font.

-hushchecksums

Causes Windvi to suppress warnings about checksum mismatches between the dvi file and the font file.

-hushspecials

Causes Windvi to suppress warnings about special strings that it cannot process.

-keep

Sets a flag to indicate that Windvi should not move to the home position when moving to a new page. See also the `k' keystroke.

-margins <dimen>

This determines the “home” position of the page within the window as follows. If the entire page fits in the window, then the margin settings are ignored. If, even after removing the margins from the left, right, top, and bottom, the page still cannot fit in the window, then the page is put in the window such that the top and left margins are hidden, and presumably the upper left-hand corner of the text on the page will be in the upper left-hand corner of the window. Otherwise, the text is centered in the window. The dimension should be a decimal number optionally followed by any of the two-letter abbreviations for units accepted by (pt, pc, in, bp, cm, mm, dd, cc or sp). See also -sidemargin, -topmargin , and the keystroke ` M .'

-mfmode <mode-def>

Specifies a mode-def string, which can be used in searching for fonts. Generally, when changing the mode-def, it is also necessary to change the font size to the appropriate value for that mode. This is done by adding a colon and the value in dots per inch; for example, -mfmode ljfour:600. This method overrides any value given by the -p command-line argument. The metafont mode is also passed to METAFONT during automatic creation of fonts. By default, it is ljfour:600

-mgs <size>

Same as -mgs1 .

-mgs[n

<size>] Specifies the size of the window to be used for the “magnifying glass” for Button n . The size may be given as an integer (indicating that the magnifying glass is to be square), or it may be given in the form width × height. Defaults are 200×150, 400×250, 700×500, 1000×800, and 1200×1200.

-nogrey

Turns off the use of greyscale anti-aliasing when printing shrunken bitmaps. (For this option, the logic of the corresponding resource is reversed: -nogrey corresponds to grey:off and +nogrey to grey:on See also the `G' keystroke.

-nomakepk

Turns off automatic generation of font files that cannot be found by other means.

-nopostscript

Turns off rendering of PostScript specials. Bounding boxes, if known, will be displayed instead. This option can also be toggled with the ` v ' keystroke.

-noscan

Normally, when PostScript is turned on, Windvi will do a preliminary scan of the dvi file, in order to send any necessary header files before sending the PostScript code that requires them. This option turns off such prescanning. (It will be automatically be turned back on if Windvi detects any specials that require headers.)

-offsets

Specifies the size of both the horizontal and vertical offsets of the output on the page. This should be a decimal number optionally followed by “ cm ”, e.g. , 1.5 or 3cm , giving a measurement in inches or centimeters. By decree of the Stanford TeX Project, the default TeX page origin is always 1 inch over and down from the top-left page corner, even when non-American paper sizes are used. Therefore, the default offsets are 1.0 inch. See also -xoffset and -yoffset .

-p <dpi>

Defines the size of the fonts to use, in pixels per inch. The default value is 600.

-qpaper <papertype>

Specifies the size of the printed page. This may be of the form width×height (or width×heightcm), where width is the width in inches (or cm) and height is the height in inches (or cm), respectively. There are also synonyms which may be used: us (8.5x11), usr (11x8.5), legal (8.5x14), foolscap (13.5x17), as well as the ISO sizes a1 - a7 , b1 - b7 , c1 - c7 , a1r - a7r ( a1 - a7rotated), etc. The default size is 21 x 29.7 cm.

-rv

Causes the page to be displayed with white characters on a black background, instead of vice versa.

-s <shrinkfactor>

Defines the initial shrink factor. The default value is to choose en appropriate factor.

-S <density>

Same as -density, q.v.

-sidemargin <dimen>

Specifies the side margin (see -margins).

-topmargin <dimen>

Specifies the top and bottom margins (see -margins).

-version

Displays the version number and exits.

-xoffset <dimen>

Specifies the size of the horizontal offset of the output on the page. See -offsets .

-yoffset <dimen>

Specifies the size of the vertical offset of the output on the page. See -offsets .

-xform

Turns on graphical transformations, which allows to apply any transformation to glyph boxes.

4.6 Mouse

left button

pops up the small magnifying glass, as long as the button is down.

middle button

pops up the medium magnifying glass, as long as the button is down.

right button

pops up the big magnifying glass, as long as the button is down.

Shift + left button

change the arrow cursor for a crossbar cursor and enter 'setting home position' mode. Home position is set when the button is released. Usefule with the 'Keep Home' feature.

4.7 Shortcut keys

Home, '^'

goto the upper left corner of the page. If margins are active, use them.

Next, 'n', Enter

goto next page.

Prior, 'b', Backspace

goto previous page.

Ctrl-Home, Ctrl-End

goto first (resp. last) page.

Numpad +, Numpad -

zoom in (resp. out).

Arrow keys, 'l', 'r', 'u', 'd'

move in the corresponding direction (left, right, up, down).

'k'

Normally when Windvi switches pages, it moves to the home position as well. The ` k ' keystroke toggles a `keep-position' flag which, when set, will keep the same position when moving between pages.

'M'

set margins at the cursor.

't'

change tick units (cursor position).