Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

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

> I explicitly specified the papersize (as letterpaper) in the document
> and used the geometry package, and still ended up with A4 coming out,
> both when using pdflatex and when using latex and dvips or xdvi.

Then either something very strange is going on, or your problem is not
related to TeX.  If you compile your example document with pdflatex and
look at the output of pdfinfo on the generated PDF file, it should look
similar to this:

Creator:        TeX
Producer:       pdfeTeX-1.21a
CreationDate:   Mon Jan 29 20:19:50 2007
Tagged:         no
Pages:          1
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      612 x 792 pts (letter)
File size:      4418 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4

If this isn't printed as letter (btw what do you mean with that, I guess
the printer doesn't have A4 and letter paper to choose from?), then
something's amiss with your printing setup, not TeX.  On the other hand,
if it doesn't show letter with the Page size, something strange is going
on on the TeX side.  Please send us the log file of your pdflatex run in
that case.

> I disagree with the position that documents should have an explicit
> papersize, for reasons I'll get to, but even if one accepts that there
> seem to be some issues with getting it to work.  It would be nice if
> specifying papersize in the documentclass were enough; failing that it
> would be nice if it could be specified without having to indicate the
> driver.  Maybe things work more smoothly in TeXLive.

No, unfortunately this is probably not going to be smooth until LaTeX
3.0.  For the time being, you need to use either geometry.sty or
hyperref.sty, plus a class (or package) option for the papersize.  The
driver is usually correctly detected, at least for pdflatex (I'm not
sure about the defaults for latex in the different versions and teTeX
vs. TeX Live)

> The discussion appears to use portable in a particular way, namely that
> everyone everywhere should get the same format from the same source
> document.  However, another sense is that everyone can process the file
> and get it formatted appropriately for them; the document comes out as
> A4 or letter or something else.  So I go latex foo and foo comes out as
> letter; you do latex foo and it comes out as A4. 

Uh.  You mean the line breaking should change?


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