DVI files do not contain information about the paper size. For that reason, one needs to actually specify the papersize of the document in question to display it in a way that corresponds to the "papersize" option in the corresponding .tex file. It would be extremely handy to have the functionality to set the paper size exposed to the command line arguments.

Use case:
The AucTeX program turns Emacs into a (La)TeX editing environment allowing the user to rapidly edit, compile and display tex input. It uses external viewers for the compiled document, in particular xdvi for dvi files. xdvi has a -papersize command line option, and AucTeX uses this to pass the papersize of the document being edited to xdvi. It would be great to be able to use Evince rather than the legacy xdvi application in this way, but the lack of the commend line option to set the paper size prevents this.

I would knock together a patch, but I think this needs an OK first, as it's not relevant only to the DVI backend.