The output leaves much to be desired, but is still
useful if you want to avoid walking to the
laser printer (or whatever) for each iteration of your
document.
Since dvi2tty produces output for terminals and line printers the
representation of documents is naturally quite primitive.
Font changes are totally ignored, which implies that
special symbols, such as mathematical symbols, get mapped into the
characters at the corresponding positions in the ``standard'' fonts.
If the width of the output text requires more columns than fits
in one line (c.f. the -w option) it is broken into several lines by
dvi2tty although they will be printed as one line on regular TEX output
devices (e.g. laser printers). To show that a broken line is really
just one logical line an asterisk (``*'') in the last position
means that the logical line is continued on the next physical
line output by dvi2tty.
Such a continuation line is started with a space and an asterisk
in the first two columns.