Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again
On Mon, 15 Mai 2006, Greg Stark wrote:
> What would you do with my "portable" document written for letter paper if all
> you have is A4 paper?
This is something *COMPLETELY* different. PLease get it!!! If you use
letter paper and produce a document in letter paper, I can still print
it on physical A4 paper if I don't have physical letter paper at hand.
But I can as well go to a shop and by letter paper.
If you want decent documents, you *HAVE TO CARE* for such things as
paper size, text width, margin size, top margin, bottom margin, foot
note size, margin note size, line spacing, and thousands of other
things. Yes, there is no "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" as we say in German.
You have to learn the language.
And with La(TeX) you can specify the paper size in the code, nothing
compiled in, nothing binary, it is *your* code which decides on which
paper you want to print.
> make TeX documents require a paper size definition. It doesn't work that way
> and unless you can convince people to make it work that way and eliminate all
> system-wide configuration then the Debian package should strive to configure
> itself reasonably as the sysadmin and users expect. Or failing that to come as
> close as reasonably possible.
There is NO NO NO reasonable default. Get it. I create on a daily basis
documents which are not A4, although my papersize is A4. B4, Crown,
whatever you want. There is no default. There is no default. There is no
default. Maybe for such simple systems as
man it may be easy and useful. But not for TeX.
Best wishes
Norbert
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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining AT logic DOT at> Università di Siena
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BRYMBO
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