Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX

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

Hi,

First, I agree with Frank (who wrote that several times in the related
bug reports) that the paper size should be explicitely specified in each
document, because the formatting depends a lot on it.

Therefore, from my POV, working "out of the box" in this context does
*not* mean "using whatever size is defined in /etc/papersize, even when
no paper size is specified in the document". If the papersize is not
specified in the document, I consider it broken.

Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:

> I tried using geometry 
> -----------------------------------
> \documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
> \usepackage[paper=letterpaper]{geometry}
>
> \begin{document}
> This is a little test of the paper size.
> \end{document}
> ----------------------------------

>From my reading of geometry's documentation, the two letterpaper
settings are redundant.

> The reference to specifying the size explicitly was puzzling, since I
> thought that's what \documentclass[letterpaper]{article} did. (I think
> I now understand the issue is writing an appropriate special).

I think '\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}' should be enough,
*provided* that you also use geometry.sty. The reason is, \documentclass
options are passed to the packages when they support the options in
question, and 'letterpaper' is a valid option for geometry.sty
(according to its documentation from teTeX 3). But you do need
geometry.sty to write the specials.

If that doesn't work, you can try explicitely specifying the driver
(dvips, pdftex, etc.) to geometry. I always do that in my documents
(actually: I have a Makefile doing that) because of habit, but I'm not
sure it's still needed nowadays, as geometry's documentation seems to
imply there is (at least some) autodetection for the driver.

Disclaimer: advice not tested, as I mainly use A4 paper.

PS: you don't tell which TeX distribution you're using.
      -> teTeX 2, 3? (seems to be one of these, since you mention tetex-base)
      -> TeX Live?

    This is important, as geometry.sty had significant changes between
    teTeX 2 and {teTeX 3, TeX Live 2005}, IIRC.

-- 
Florent