Bug#225833: Letter vs A4 again

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

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:

> Note that when I compile your program I'll get a different binary. My binary
> will be linked with different libraries and use the configuration on my
> machine. Your source code is not "portable" in the sense you're using to
> describe your typeset documents.

Of course it is. I can follow my analogy to match the differences
between binaries you are talking about: depending on your settings in
map files, $FONT will or will not be embedded in the resulting PS/PDF
file. The source code doesn't guarantee 100 % reproducibility of the
result, but it does ensure that the most important features (such as
paper size for a document) will be preserved.

> In fact "portable" means pretty much the opposite of how you're using it when
> used to describe source code for programs. It refers to source code that will
> work in different environments because it doesn't hard code assumptions about
> the environment. Source code that *doesn't* need to be hand modified when
> taken to a new platform.

And that is why my documents are portable, and yours not: if I want to
compile a document you provided (without the paper size specification)
on my platform and obtain the right result, I *have* to add a
letterpaper option to it, i.e., modify it by hand.

> What good would it be to ship your source code to me with my x86 processor if
> it's still going to compile to PPC code when I compile it? I may as well have
> received the binary.

You've gone too far and the analogy gets flawed at this point. As you
imply, PPC code is mostly useless on an x86 machine (but not totally:
what if I am testing a PPC emulator?). But a letter-formatted PDF file
is not useless in Europe. I can at least read it on screen without the
slightest problem.

> Likewise I have no A4 paper here -- I've never even *seen* an A4 sheet of
> paper. What good would it be to have my compiler generate an A4 document I
> can't run on my processor?

You can read it on screen, you can scale-print it, and if you're not
happy with that, then you have more work to do, but there is no way
around it. Adapt the paper size in the .tex file, compile it and fix the
problems brought by the new layout, because there *will* be such
problems, most probably.

-- 
Florent