Dvipdfm (and dvipdfmx) translates direct from DVI to PDF (all other available routes produce PostScript output using dvips and then convert that to PDF with ghostscript or Acrobat’s Distiller).
Dvipdfm/Dvipdfmx are particularly flexible
applications. They permit the inclusion of bitmap and PDF
graphics (as does PDFTeX), but are also
capable of employing
ghostscript “on the
fly” to permit the inclusion of encapsulated PostScript (eps)
files by translating them to PDF. In this way, they combine the good
qualities of dvips and of PDFTeX as a means of
processing illustrated documents.
Unfortunately, “ordinary” LaTeX can’t deduce the bounding box of a binary bitmap file (such as JPEG or PNG), so you have to specify the bounding box. This may be done explicitly, in the document:
\usepackage[dvipdfm]{graphicx}
...
\includegraphics[bb=0 0 540 405]{photo.jpg}
It’s usually not obvious what values to give the “bb” key,
but the program ebb will generate a file
containing the information; the above numbers came from an
ebb output file photo.bb:
If such a file is available, you may abbreviate the inclusion code, above, to read:%%Title: /home/gsm10/photo.jpg %%Creator: ebb Version 0.5.2 %%BoundingBox: 0 0 540 405 %%CreationDate: Mon Mar 8 15:17:47 2004
\usepackage[dvipdfm]{graphicx}
...
\includegraphics{photo}
which makes the operation feel as simple as does including
eps images in a LaTeX file for processing with
dvips; the graphicx package knows to look for a
bb file if no bounding box is provided in the
\includegraphics command.
The one place where usage isn’t quite so simple is the need to quote dvipdfm explicitly, as an option when loading the graphicx package: if you are using dvips, you don’t ordinarily need to specify the fact, since the default graphics configuration file (of most distributions) “guesses” the dvips option if you’re using TeX.
This answer last edited: 2013-06-03
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