Bug#397391: texlive-pdfetex: Documentation for how to get pdf(e|la)tex to use letter-size paper is missing

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> wrote:

> Package: texlive-pdfetex
> Version: 2005.dfsg.2-2
> Severity: wishlist
>
> I'm still not sure I did this right to make everything within TeXLive
> happy... I copied pdftexconfig.tex into /etc/texmf/tex/generic/config
> then hacked it as follows, since none of the obvious approaches
> (running texconfig in various and sundry ways) seemed to work:
[...]
> In any event, could this go in an FAQ somewhere?  

Have you read

file:///usr/share/texmf-texlive/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-papersize.html

> I suppose the
> "right" thing would be to have this file modified based on the paper
> size set in libpaper1's debconf settings...

This has been asked a lot for teTex, too.  But the problem is that it's
not easy to define what to do and which settings should be changed.
Personally, I never had a problem with the settings in pdftexconfig.tex
or dvips' configuration or anything, since I simply use geometry.sty or
hyperref.sty, which set the papersize properly.

Maybe the question that it is "not easy to define what to do" is part of
your problem.  If you use the pdftexconfig.tex that you posted with
plain pdftex, it's supposed to create letter paper (assuming that the
numbers you gave are for letter) in PDF mode.  If you use LaTeX without
geometry.sty or hyperref.sty, the same is true.

However, if you create DVI, there's no way to code the paper size in the
DVI file.  All that can be done is include PS specials that dvips or
dvipdfm can read, but this is *not* achieved by changing \pdfpageheight
or \pdfpagewidth.  Here, again, you need geometry.sty or hyperref.sty.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)