Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again
On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 16:38 -0400, Gregory Stark wrote:
>
> 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.
The problem is that (to first order) a DVI file knows nothing about
paper sizes. So LaTeX itself does not inform pdfTeX/dvips about the
paper size used. This is a problem for producing PDF files, since there
the page size has to be explicitly set. Hence a default paper size is
used, if the user does not specify the paper size by other means
(geometry.sty, hyperref.sty and the KOMA Script classes do come to my
mind).
> I'm also confused as the earlier bug reports mentioned an
> /etc/texmf/pdftex.cfg but there's no such file on my machine.
pdfTeX no longer uses a run time configuration file. Things like the
default paper size are now part of the format (eg pdflatex.fmt). From my
point of view, this change makes it impossible to use /etc/papersize
together with pdfTeX.
> 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?
texconfig(-sys) paper letter
or use a package like geometry that informs the pdfTeX/dvips about the
paper size used. See also 'texdoc TETEXDOC'.
cheerio
ralf
Reply to: