Dear maintainers of db2latex, db2latex does not work properly with teTeX 3.0 (released in February this year and included in many operating system distributions now) and TeXLive 2005 (released this fall): It always produces PDF instead of DVI files.
The reason is that these TeX distributions use pdfetex as the engine behind latex *and* pdflatex, pdfetex can produce DVI and PDF output. But the tests in db2latex that try to detect whether PDF or DVI output were buggy from the beginning (although not invented by you, for sure), and now fail: They test whether \pdfoutput is *defined*, and assume PDF output if yes, while in pdfitex it is always defined, but set to 0 if DVI output is wanted. Even worse, the LaTeX files created by db2latex *set* \pdfoutput to 1 if they find that it is defined, and therefore always produce PDF files. This problem makes db2latex unusable in Debian (and many other distributions), and breaks out automatic building of package documentation in some cases. Therefore we need a fix rather quickly, and would be glad if you would implement this: The maintainers of the package within Debian are very busy currently, and I'm only the teTeX maintainer who doesn't know anything about sgml or xml or whatever language db2latex uses. What I can tell you is how LaTeX files produced by db2latex should look like, there is an easy and a thorough solution: - the easy one is to load ifpdf.sty with \usepackage{ifpdf}, and use the conditional \ifpdf % code for PDF output \else % code for DVI output \fi (the else branch can be left out, \fi is mandatory) - the thorough one would be to check whether such a discrimination is needed at all. For example, such a check is frequently used for hyperref, but in fact this package has output format tests built in and does not need to be called with an output driver option except in very special cases. If you want to go that way, feel free to ask me on debian-tetex-maint@lists.debian.org which of your checks is necessary. Many thanks in advance, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer