Chapter 4: Pages
4.1 Physical pages versus TeX pages
Every time TeX writes a page to a dvi file it inserts codes
indicating the beginning (BOP) and end (EOP) of the
page. The number of physical pages is thus the number of
BOP's in the dvi file.
At the start of each physical page, TeX records
additional information
indicating what page number will appear when the dvi file is
printed. (More precisely, it stores the contents of the first ten
\count registers, the first of which is usually the register
used to store the page number printed at the bottom of the page.)
This page number is the TeX page.
Thus, it is possible to have a dvi file that when
printed consists of 10 physical pieces of papers where
each page has the number '1' printed at the bottom of the page.
For example, the file test.dvi consists of 6 physical pages,
with TeX page numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, -1, -3.
dvii -p test
p:[1/1]
p:[2/2]
p:[3/3]
p:[4/4]
p:[5/-1]
p:[6/-3]
The first number in the bracket is the physical page while the second
is the TeX page.
If you want to suppress the display of physical pages, use the
-P option (see section 3.13).