Now that there is a way to sync a pdf file and tex file in both direc­tions, the only remain­ing rea­son to use dvi files is when the graph­ics are in eps format.

How­ever, that prob­lem has also been solved for those using Mik­TeX 2.8 or TeXLive 2009. In Mik­TeX 2.8, sim­ply include the pack­age epstopdf along with graphicx. (As noted in the com­ments below, even this step is not nec­es­sary in TeXLive 2009.) Then when you use pdfla­tex, the eps files will be auto­mat­i­cally con­verted to pdf at com­pile time. (The con­ver­sion only hap­pens the first time you process the file, and is skipped if there is already a pdf file with the same name.)

For exam­ple:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx,epstopdf}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{fig1}
\end{document}

Then even though the only graph­ics file avail­able is fig1.eps, this will still be processed ok using pdfla­tex or pdf­tex­ify. On the first pass, a new file called fig1-eps-coverted-to.pdf is cre­ated and inserted at the appro­pri­ate place. See the doc­u­men­ta­tion for more options and details.

Thanks to Joseph Wright for bring­ing this to my attention.

Dvi is dead. Long live pdf.

Related Posts:

• Syn­chro­niz­ing WinEdt and pdf files
• Make­files for R/​​LaTeX projects
• Get­ting a LaTeX sys­tem set up on a PC
• Main­tain­ing local LaTeX files
• XeLa­TeX with TeXstudio