Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de> writes:

> 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). 

Then what is this red bounding box xdvi shows me that seems to match the paper
dimensions? In any case I don't think that's quite correct, adding
[letterpaper] did in fact fix the pdflatex output, but not the dvips output
(or perhaps it was the other way around).

> > 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

How would I have found out about this except reading the various bug reports
on this issue? In fact I've never seen texconfigsys mentioned anywhere, even
in those bug reports.

How hard would it be to provide a shell script that runs texconfig-sys with
the output from libpaper and just document that you have to run it to get tex
to work properly?

As it currently stands it requires users to go hunt through bug reports to
find the magic bit of lore they need to get tex to work.

> or use a package like geometry that informs the pdfTeX/dvips about the
> paper size used. See also 'texdoc TETEXDOC'.

-- 
greg