Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:

> You have to default to something, it may as well be something reasonable. You
> would prefer eliminating /etc/papersize and having every package have its own
> configuration? Or having the user have to set the paper size on every
> document?

Exactly. If you don't specify the paper size *in your document*, then
that document is not portable: compiling it on your computer will give a
different result than compiling it on mine (and on mine, it will most
likely have problems such as overfull boxes, etc.).

> You seem to be equating configuring paper sizes with run-time usage like
> understanding how to write LaTeX code.

Indeed, setting the paper size should be done via LaTeX code.

> it's generally a one-time configuration at install time. Normally
> users would expect a system with TeX installed would already be
> configured properly by the sysadmin when the package was installed.

Precisely: if the system is configured properly (say, defaulting to A5
format), it will force users to write portable documents, which is
highly desirable.

Similarly, sane people declare their babel parameters *in their
documents*, instead of using a configuration file that encourages to
write non-portable documents.

[ I'm thinking of these three lines I always put in my documents written
  in French:

    \NoAutoSpaceBeforeFDP
    \FrenchItemizeSpacingtrue
    \FrenchListSpacingtrue

  Of course, I could put them in frenchb.cfg instead, but the only
  effect would be an incentive to remove the three lines from each
  document and therefore write non-portable LaTeX code. ]

-- 
Florent