dvips

In computing, dvips is the most widely used program for converting the output of the TeX typesetting system into a printable form.

TeX outputs device independent (DVI) files, which as the name implies, are intended to be independent of the output device. In particular, they are not understood by printers and lack information such as font shapes. Thus a backend is needed to translate from a DVI file to a printer language.

dvips was written by Tomas Rokicki to produce printable PostScript files from DVI input. By using TeX \special commands, it is possible to insert literal PostScript into the DVI file and have it appear in the output once it has passed through dvips. This allows great flexibility and is exploited by graphics packages such as pstricks.

Although other DVI backends such as dvilj exist, dvips is by far the most ubiquitous way of printing DVI files. (Though using pdftex to directly generate PDF files has been gaining popularity.) As such, it is a standard part of most TeX distributions.