Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again
Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:
> Generally what would happen on any reasonably configured system is they would
> go to Europe, for example, and rerun LaTeX on their document and print it on
> the paper available. If they've only run LaTeX on their document in the US
> before and printed on letter paper then presumably they would have to check
> the formatting on the new page size just like they had to at home after any
> change.
Ah, we were misunderstanding. Now I think I understand a bit better,
and the answer is even more: No. No, really not.
First of all, there's no way to make TeX change the margins it uses
without changing the document code, you can't have a site-wide
customization for that (or at least, it would lead to mayhem).
So all we could do would be to instruct dvips/pdftex to specifiy a paper
size that doesn't fit to the margins used in the document. You don't
want that.
You simply can't auto-convert a LaTeX document between two paper sizes.
If I'm creating a A4 document, then it should be typeset on A4. If
anybody wants to print it on letterpaper, well they can try and live
with the bad output. Florent has described a couple of approaches. But
a system should never be configured to automatically convert anything
there.
> You guys are talking as if every document is a perfected static document. Not
> everybody wants a "portable" document that looks identical
> everywhere.
Then they should not use TeX. Or, well, they can use TeX. But we won't
misconfigure TeX, just on Debian, to behave as they want, and get famous
for breaking TeX's well known "look identical everywhere" feature [even
more than it already is].
> If that's the case they would just ship the PDF or Postscript.
>
> Most people most of the time when they're rerunning LaTeX on their source file
> are doing it because they've made changes or their environment has changed.
> There's no point in trying to reconstruct precisely the same document every
> time even if they're on a new system where different paper sizes are
> available.
You are right, but then you just change the papersize option in the
LaTeX code, and you get the new size. If you've done it properly (using
geometry or typearea or whatever), you change exactly one occurrence of
"a4paper" to "letterpaper" or similar, and you're done: The margins will
be for the new papersize, and dvips or pdftex will produces PS/PDF files
for printing on the respective size.
Any automatism would only change the last part (produce PS/PDF files for
printing on the respective size) but leave the rest: The layout will
look ugly, and if you've small margins, you might even loose text.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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