I am trying to create pdf files from LaTeX.  Currently I have run
latex, dvips, ps2pdf (which invokes ghostscript to generate the pdf
file).  All this is from pkgsrc.

When I view the pdf file with xpdf (also from pkgsrc) I get dots and
odd symbols completely unrelated to the original LaTeX source.

Any ideas about what is going wrong?  Has anyone successfully created
pdf files from LaTeX source?  What did you do?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Brook