pdfTex is an implementation of TeX that outputs PDF documents.
To use pdfTeX in TeXMode? (‘tex-mode’), set the ‘tex-command’ variable by putting the following in your .emacs file
(setq tex-command "pdftex")
To use a PDF-capable viewer with the ‘tex-view’ command, you must override the definition for the ‘tex-view’ function, by using:
(defun tex-view ()
(interactive)
(tex-send-command "xpdf" (tex-append tex-print-file ".pdf")))where xpdf is the name of the PDF-capable viewing command.
Simply, using (setq tex-dvi-view-command "xpdf") is not a solution.
See also PDFLaTeX.