What viewer would you recommend then? Would you mind posting a screenshot coming from the optimal viewer you have in mind? Like I said, I haven't found any viewer that does a better job.

I’m not current, so I don’t know if anyone has bothered to do a dvi viewer optimized for today’s display technology. Given the billions of dollars invested in the pdf ecosystem, though, it’s a reasonable place to live.

> I’m not current, so I don’t know if anyone has bothered to do a dvi viewer optimized for today’s display technology.

Oh, if that's the problem, then please just point to a better viewer for yesterday's display technology. Or even a decade ago's. I'll find you an older monitor from whatever era you had a good viewing experience on and try it on that. Because I'm one hundred percent sure an older display technology is not going to make it look better. You can see above that above pointed out that it's looked awful since 2003. I can vouch that it's consistently been awful since over a decade ago, and PDFs have consistently been fine... on every kind of display and resolution I've tried. I've absolutely never, ever had a good experience viewing DVIs.

1982 DataDisc displays that Knuth developed everything on? Sorry you’re unhappy, but given that dvi is literally a dump of TeX’s internal results on layout positioning, it contains all the information that any other system could possibly use. Perhaps your concerns have more to do with font rendering?

Indeed -- I think it's clear dataflow's main issue is with the font rendering. The image shows subpixel antialiasing on the PDF version, and not on the DVI, so naturally they look quite different.

But that's nothing to do with DVI itself; it's entirely the responsibility of the renderer.

I find these responses baffling. I'm just an end-user. All I see is that every time I get a DVI file, I want to tear my eyes out, no matter where or when I open it. First my assessment gets questioned, then when I spend time installing software and compiling an example just to demonstrate the concrete problem upon request -- which I have no reason to believe was novel or previously unknown in any way -- I'm promptly shut down and told to respect the file format and instead blame all the viewers in existence. Great -- so what was/am I supposed to do with this information? Are my eyes supposed to see the file clearly now that the blame got assigned somewhere? Or am I supposed to write my own DVI viewer tomorrow afternoon? How is this intended to be helpful?

It's not helpful if you're expecting to be handed polished products that do what you want. It is helpful if you want to understand what's going on. I think it would be interesting to get a high quality DVI viewer based on modern graphics tech, but of course such a thing will take time and effort. I plan to meet with Dr. Fuchs in the next few weeks to talk about this and related issues.

It’s not helpful if what you’re interested in is a DVI viewer that gives just as smooth user experience as well as, say, Preview, Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader. Because that doesn’t currently exist. But it’s useful if you want to understand why the DVI format was invented and why there’s a difference between viewing DVI and PDF files.

It’s not clear at all what the problem is. Imgur renders both of your images with very high compression on my devices so I can’t spot any difference.

Secondly can you please define ‘tear my eyes out’? You’ve not provided any attempt any any technical description of what it is you’re experiencing. How is anyone supposed to help you when you don’t say what the problem is?