Bug#289848: tetex-bin: pdflatex generates truncated seminar slides

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.org> schrieb:

>> In your example, there is no way for pdftex to know which physical
>> pages sizes you want. Of course it knows of the area it can use for
>> typesetting, but this is a different thing. If you use
>> \usepackage{hyperref} (and IIRC geometry.sty as well), it will read
>> the a4paper specification from the global options and put a
>> PDF-special indicating the papersize into the PDF file.
>
> I don't understand. pdfinfo says:
>
> Creator:        TeX
> Producer:       pdfTeX-1.10b
> CreationDate:   Tue Jan 11 11:07:00 2005
> Tagged:         no
> Pages:          1
> Encrypted:      no
> Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)

with hyperref, this is:

Page size:      841.89 x 595.276 pts (A4)

> So, pdflatex could get the page size. But it didn't put the page in
> landscape orientation (dvips did that automatically, I didn't need
> to provide the "-t landscape" option).
>
>> So essentially this is not a bug in pdftex, rather it is a
>> limitation in how LaTeX typesetting works, and can quite easily be
>> fixed by adding additional \usepackage commands.
>
> Note that in my .tex file, I used the a4 option. This should be
> sufficient.

Well, it would be nice if that was sufficient, but it isn't; you need
hyperref.sty or geometry.sty. These packages show that it is possible to
teach pdftex to do it; the fact that it isn't done without them shows
that if at all, this is a bug in LaTeX, not in the pdftex binary.

By the way, the minimal LaTeX example is

\documentclass[a4paper,landscape]{article}
%\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}
Test
\end{document}

You don't _see_ the error here, but pdfinfo shows the wrong
orientation. I am sure the same could be done with a plainTeX document
with and without appropriate specials. 

Therefore it is clear that this is not a bug, but a missing feature, and
it is missing in LaTeX, not pdftex. If you insist, we can retitle and
reassign this to tetex-base, and report it to the LaTeX project bug
database. But I am sure that this will not change anything: In a to-be
LaTeX 3.0, there will most probably easy access to pdf specials, anyway,
even without our bug report. An for bugfix releases of LaTeX2e, such a
change will not be made.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer