This program makes PNG or GIF graphics from DVI files as obtained from TeX and its relatives. Its benefits include its speed (it is the fastest bitmap-rendering code for DVI files known to the author. On a fairly low-end laptop, it takes less than a second to generate 150 one-formula images), it does not read the postamble (so it can be started before TeX finishes and there is a -follow switch that makes dvipng wait at EOF for further output, unless it finds the POST marker that indicates the end of the DVI), and it supports PK, VF and Type1 fonts, color specials, simple PostScript inclusion and more. The motivation for this project is preview-latex, a previewing tool for LaTeX in emacs, but dvipng can be independently useful.

The author is Jan-Åke Larsson.