dvipng is a cross-platform program for converting the DVI output of the (TeX

TeX

TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....

) typesetting system into PNG image format. Dvipng was written by Jan-Åke Larsson.

The traditional TeX82 outputs device independent (DVI) files, which as the name implies, are intended to be independent of the output device

Device independent

A program or file is device independent when its function is universal on different types of device.For the World Wide Web, this means writing simple common denominator Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets so that most Web user agents on most devices can render it acceptably.For...

, but do not embed the actual font

Font

In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...

s. As such, DVI files are not suitable for use by web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

s, and a conversion program is needed to translate from a DVI file to an image. Dvipng renders the font glyphs into the images, for example using FreeType

FreeType

FreeType is a software library written in C that implements a font rasterization engine. It is used to render text on to bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations.-Details:...

 when available.

Although it is possible to generate web graphics using other DVI backends such as dvips

Dvips

dvips is a software program that converts the DVI format output of TeX typography into a printable or otherwise presentable form. dvips was written by Tomas Rokicki to produce printable PostScript files from DVI input, and is now commonly used for general DVI conversion.The TeX typesetting system...

 followed by a PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

-to-image converter like ImageMagick

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is an open source software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image files. It can read and write over 100 image file formats. ImageMagick is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.- Features and capabilities:...

, using dvipng requires fewer programs to be run. Dvipng is used as the default rendering method for MediaWiki

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

 software, as of version 1.8.0. It is also included in the TeXLive distribution and several Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

distributions.