[Note from moderator: Discussion of TeX-nicalities is admittedly off-topic, but the last paragraph below is of wide interest.] Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca> writes:
If you read the TAC instructions for authors, you will find that we discourage the use of the graphics package unless absolutely necessary because, for the time being, dvi is still our basic archive format and graphics specials were not rendered properly by dvi viewers.
I'm curious what you mean by this. One of my duties as Managing Editor of Homology, Homotopy and Applications is to oversee the copyediting and typesetting, and I produce the final versions of all files in dvi, ps and pdf format on my linux machine. We receive files using quite a variety of graphics packages, including the "graphics" package, and rarely have any problems with the resulting dvi files. (I test using xdvi.) The only problem I can recall is with figures that are rotated 90 degrees, and for such papers we simply don't make the dvi file publicly available.
Neither pdflatex nor dvipdfm renders graphics specials correctly.
The pdf files for HHA are almost always produced using dvipdfm, and again this works quite reliably in my experience. In some cases, we use pdflatex, and again I have had no trouble with it. dvipdfm works even in the one or two cases where xdvi didn't display a file correctly, such as with rotated figures. And while for most files I regard dvi as the primary processed archive, I also use the snapshot package to save most of the .sty files each article includes, so that if necessary in the future the articles can be reprocessed to produce some hypothetical new format that contains information not in the dvi file. (E.g. to add hyperlinks to all articles.) While I am writing, I'd like to encourage readers of this list to submit articles to HHA and to ask their libraries to subscribe if they don't already. The price is quite reasonable, and we regularly publish articles with a categorical bent. All articles are available online at http://intlpress.com/HHA You can receive announcements of new articles by writing directly to me and asking to be put on the announcements mailing list. Best wishes, Dan