dvipng
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, dvipng is a widely used program for converting the output of the 
(TeX) typesetting system into image format.
TeX outputs device independent (DVI) files, which as the name implies, are intended to be independent of the output device. As such, they are not understood by, e.g., browsers and lack information such as font shapes. Thus a backend is needed to translate from a DVI file to an image.
dvipng was written by Jan-Åke Larsson to produce portable PNG files from DVI input.
Although it is possible to generate web graphics using other DVI backends such as dvips followed by a PostScript-to-image converter like ImageMagick, using dvipng is more lightweight and requires less programs to be run, making it faster in practice. As such, it is a standard part of most TeX distributions.
