dvipng makes PNG or GIF graphics from DVI files
obtained from TeX and its relatives. Its benefits
include speed; it uses very fast bitmap-rendering
code for DVI files. Furthermore, it does not read
the postamble, so it can be started before TeX
finishes. It supports PK, VF, PostScript Type1
(via FreeType or t1lib), and TrueType fonts (via
FreeType), color specials, can render CJK fonts,
and more.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Changes:
The main code addition is limited support for literal PostScript specials using gs. For example, most of the PSTricks package can now be rendered using dvipng. Unfortunately, dvipng can only handle drawing PostScript code at the moment, not PostScript code intended to make dvips + gs scale, rotate, or move DVI glyphs (characters). This is because the graphics state cannot be communicated back to dvipng from gs. As a result, there are no guarantees. Also, the performance in terms of runtime could be better.
