Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again

[Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

It's actually worse than that.

I have a LaTeX document that specifies

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}

This works fine in LaTeX, it generates a correctly sized DVI file which
generates a fine postscript file using dvips. However pdflatex overrides this
with the "default" and generates an incorrect A4 page with the first inch of
the page cut off.

So your hard coded dimensions are actually overriding the document's specified
dimensions.

I'm also confused as the earlier bug reports mentioned an
/etc/texmf/pdftex.cfg but there's no such file on my machine.

Is this configuration that the user is expected to do for each tex tool
documented anywhere? Where can I find a list of files I have to touch to
switch to letter paper?

-- 
greg