Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> writes:

> 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).  

Sure you can, in fact you already do have such a thing. It's not an error not
to specify margin sizes in your document, there is a default specified in the
class files. If the sysadmin felt like it he could go and edit those defaults.
Of course people are unlikely to want to edit those files, but they sure do
want to their default paper size set appropriately.

-- 
greg