Bug#402994: use new libpaper hook to track system paper size
On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 08:23 +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> texconfig and therefore the paperconfig hook do *not* control the paper
> size that is used for typesetting (i.e. when TeX runs and calculates
> where to put the characters relative to the paper origin). It only
> takes effect when a PostScript or PDF file is created from the result.
ACK. This is an important distinction to make.
> First of all, "texconfig paper $PAPER" only allows letter and a4. So
> either we need to change the hook script to check for that - or we patch
> texconfig to recognize more paper sizes.
The current limitation is pdftex, which can have it's default papersize
changed only by changing pdftexconfig.tex and redumping all formats. The
different pdftexconfig.tex files needed for a4 and letter are hardcoded
into texconfig.
> Second, the files that are affected are currently not configuration
> files, which is a bug. But what should we do? If we make them
> conffiles, users will get "configuration file changed by you or a
> script" if the file is changed upon upgrade. Although the statement is
> true, it won't help people very much who never looked at that file, in
> particular since the right choice would be to accept the new version
> from the package - it will be changed again right away by the libpaper
> hook.
How about having the original files in TEXMFDIST and change texconfig
such, that it writes the new files to TEXMF(SYS)VAR? That way the user
will not have to deal with the files. But if needed, these files can be
overruled by a file in TEXMF(SYS)CONFIG. One problem that I see right
now is what texconfig(-sys) should do when such a file exists in
TEXMF(SYS)CONFIG. Tricky ...
> One approach would be to separate the papersize setting out of the
> existing files, let texconfig paper act on the extracted files (which
> would reside in /var, not /etc) and let the programs read both the main
> config file and the papersize file. But I'm not sure whether this can
> be done without code changes to dvips/dvipdfm?
dvipdfm allready links against libpaper. For dvips I currently see no
possibility to have one configuration file specify another one, that
should also be read.
cheerio
ralf
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