[1] Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not intended to be human-readable; they consist of binary data describing the visual layout of a document in a manner not reliant on any specific image format, display hardware or printer.

Drivers are also used to convert from DVI to popular page description languages (e.g. PostScript, PDF) and for printing.

Toward this end, a DVI file is a sequence of commands which form "a machine-like language", in Knuth's words.

The fonts themselves are not embedded in the DVI file, only referenced by an integer value defined in the relevant fnt_defi op.

f contains an integer value of up to four bytes in length, though in practice, TeX only ever outputs font numbers in the range 0 through 255.

Instead DVI has a general escape/extension mechanism, known as specials (expressed by the \special command in TeX), which defers graphics (and color) to post-processing filters.

[4]: 6, 17 DVI files are often converted into PDF, PostScript, or PCL format for reading and printing.

[12] A possibly different program with the same name—described as a modified version of dvips—was announced in the late 1990s by Sergey Lesenko,[13][14][15] however it was apparently never released.

[18] dvipdfm supports most of the newer special functions of the PDF format, including bookmarks, annotations, thumbnails, and dvips specials—a feature making possible the inclusion of Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) files like METAPOST output—as well inclusion of JPEG and PNG images; other features of dvipdfm include partial font embedding (reducing file size) and balancing the internal PDF document trees to speed up rendering of large documents.

The 2004, 4th edition of the Guide to LaTeX compares them in the following way:[20] The dvipdfm program is in the original spirit of TEX, that uses DVI as a universal intermediate format for all outputs.

That said, one must consider that TEX was invented in the days when no one printer specification dominated the field.

If all of your graphics files are already in PDF format, with some JPEG and PNG images, the more direct route is to run pdflatex.