LaTeX question: What does putting dvips in the \documentclass do?

[AxiomOfChoice]

LaTeX question: What does putting "dvips" in the \documentclass do?

At my university, the master's thesis template in LaTeX begins with the following specification:

\documentclass[12pt,dvips]{report}

What in the world does putting the "dvips" do? What difference does it make?

 

[diazona]

dvips is an option accepted by several packages to indicate that the document will be converted to PostScript with dvips. Certain tasks (like drawing) are done in different ways depending on which output driver is used (dvips is one output driver, pdflatex is another), so a package that does something like that needs to know whether it should produce output appropriate for dvips or pdflatex or whatever.

As for why the option is passed to the class, I believe options passed to the document class also get passed to all packages included with \usepackage.

Most relatively modern packages can automatically detect which output driver is being used, so you might be able to safely remove the dvips option.

 

[AxiomOfChoice]

dvips is an option accepted by several packages to indicate that the document will be converted to PostScript with dvips. Certain tasks (like drawing) are done in different ways depending on which output driver is used (dvips is one output driver, pdflatex is another), so a package that does something like that needs to know whether it should produce output appropriate for dvips or pdflatex or whatever.

As for why the option is passed to the class, I believe options passed to the document class also get passed to all packages included with \usepackage.

Most relatively modern packages can automatically detect which output driver is being used, so you might be able to safely remove the dvips option.

Nice. Thanks a lot!