Dvips: A DVI to PostScript Translator |
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Copyright (C) 1993, 94 Karl Berry.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled "Regain your programming freedom" and "GNU General Public License" are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the sections entitled "Regain your programming freedom" and "GNU General Public License" may be included in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation instead of in the original English.
Introduction
This manual corresponds to version 2.6 of the Kpathsea library, released in January 1995.
The library's fundamental purpose is to look up a file in a list of directories specified by the user, similar to what shells do when looking up program names to execute.
The following software, all of which I maintain, uses this library:
- Dviljk
- Dvipsk (see section `Introduction' in Dvips: A DVI driver)
- GNU font utilities (see section `Introduction' in GNU font utilities)
- Web2c (see section `Introduction' in Web2c: A TeX implementation)
- Xdvik
The library is still under development (and probably always will be, despite my hopes). I do not promise to keep the interface unchanged. If you have comments or suggestions, please send them to me (see section Reporting bugs).
Currently, I distribute the library under the GNU General Public License (see section GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE). In short, this means if you write a program using the library, you must (offer to) distribute the source, and allow anyone to modify the source and distribute their modifications.
If you have a problem with this, contact me. I would consider putting the library under the GNU Library General Public License, which would permit you to distribute the source only to the library, not to your program using it. But I will only do this if someone actually says they will not use the library under the GPL conditions, and would use it under the LGPL.
If you know enough about TeX to be reading this manual, then you (or perhaps your institution) should consider joining the TeX Users Group (if you're already a member, great!). TUG produces a periodical called TUGboat, sponsors an annual meeting (the proceedings of which are published in TUGboat), and arranges courses on TeX for all levels of users. Given sufficient funding (which your joining will help) TUG could sponsor more projects that will benefit the TeX community, such as a successor to TeX $\pi$ . Anyway, here is the address:
TeX Users Group P.O. Box 869 Santa Barbara, CA 93102 USA phone: (805) 899-4673 email: `tug@tug.org'History
(This section is for those people who are curious about how this came about.) (If you like to read historical accounts of software, I urge you to seek out the GNU Autoconf manual and, even more fun, the "Errors of TeX" paper that Don Knuth published in Software--Practice and Experience.)
My first ChangeLog entry for Web2c seems to be February 1990, but I may have done some stuff before then. In any case, Tim Morgan and I were sort of jointly maintaining it for a time. (I should s