.dvi file extensions displaying instead of PDF uploads

Question

.dvi file extensions displaying instead of PDF uploads

I have a 25 PDF files sent by a professor to add to his course site. Each file shows the extension .pdf and when I double click the filename, it opens and displays properly in Acrobat. When I upload the file through UPLOAD AND MANAGE FILES, it shows a different filename extension, .dvi. For instance a filename of 01_complex.pdf appears in my browser as complex.dvi and then as the name in the iTunes U course site as complex.dvi. I have opened these files in Acrobat and done File As and the same still happens. I dragged each of these files into iTunes > Books, done Get Info and entered a Name, artist, year, album and genre info and then uploaded those files with the exact same result. (location ..Music:iTunes:iTunes Music: Books: Artist Name: fullname of track that I entered and saved). Why is this happening? How can I get the correct names etc. uploaded to the iTunes U site? BTW, I think the prof saved the files to PDF from TeX but have not reached him to confirm.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Aug 17, 2010 2:56 PM

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Answer 1

richwolf

Level 3

725 points

Aug 18, 2010 2:16 AM in response to Stuart Glogoff

Stuart,

dvi files are generated by TeX, LaTeX, BibTeX et al. Way back "in the day", I used to be a TeX consultant at my U. 🙂 "dvi" stands for "device independent" where "device" = "printer"…that's the way TeX generates output…as a set of dvi files. Normally, you have to run dvi files through some other tool that turns them into something that targets a specific printer…say dvi2pdf, like that. 🙂

If you can provide a link to a typical file, maybe we could look at it and give you some insight. 🙂 In the short term, I would definitely verify that what you've got is PDF and not dvi…they are really different things.

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Answer 2

Aug 18, 2010 9:09 AM in response to Stuart Glogoff

Thanks richwolf for the LaTex explanation. Good for anyone not familiar with LaTex and the .dvi file extension. Found a good explanation on Wikipedia, too.

The solution has been to open the file in Adobe Acrobat Pro > Document drop down menu > Examine Document > Remove > Save and upload that saved file. I have 24 of them, so did this to each one. Then dragged files in Books in iTunes and edited Get Info there and uploaded those files. For some reason on the upload and manage file activity page in the browser, the Name is carried over but the artist info (fac name) is not so I had to add that again for each. They uploaded and are working fine now as PDFs in the course.

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