> For a DVI file to be printed or even properly previewed, the fonts it references must be already installed.

If you want alternatives, I'd choose DjVu. But it's too late now, everyone is converged on PDFs, and the alternatives are not good enough to warrant the switch.

DVI isn’t suitable as you’d still have to intuit where the paragraph- and even word-breaks are; what’s body text vs. headers/footers, sidebars, captions, etc; never mind what math expression a particular jumble of characters and rules came from.