Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 03:36:56PM +0100, Norbert Preining wrote:
> ...
>> First: dvi format *does*not*support* the paper size
>
> This seems to me to be the root of the problem. la/tex knows the paper
> size, but that information gets lost, and so it has to be put back in
> or placed in some \special.
>
> Are there plans to fix this upstream? If not, could we ask for it?
> If all the tools recognized the same \special syntax that would seem
> to eliminate the need for worrying about the driver.
I guess the problem is not the drivers that are currently under
development. It's the drivers that seem to be no longer developed at
all (all the exotic ones like dvilj etc.), or where development is
mostly stalled (e.g. dvips; some synchronization in the sense "now also
understands former dvipdfm-specific specials" would make sense, but
who's going to write the code?). And of course those that don't aim at
compatibility at all, like a(ctive)dvi - don't know whether this is
still actively developed.
Maybe if a future version of LaTeX puts pressure on the driver
developers, it might happen...
> Having to
> anticipate all possible drivers strikes me as an unnecessary burden,
> even if Makefiles can work around it. Of course, it is not possible
> to know what future drivers will arise. Similarly, if the dvi format
> itself has paper size, other tools could use it (perhaps changing the
> dvi format is a bigger deal).
I would be quite surprised if the DVI format would be changed. It's
practically as sacred as Knuth's original TeX (the program). Instead, I
expect other formats to replace DVI (PDF has started, maybe there are
others on the way).
> Finally, all the remarks about the inappropriateness of specifying a
> system-wide default papersize being improper, because each document
> may have its own paper size, can also be made about specifying a
> document-wide paper size. An individual document may have different
> paper sizes as well. The most common example is a letter and an
> envelope or mailing label. There are some packages that support that
> now; I guess they may be specific to postscript output.
I know these packages exist, but don't know how they make it - it's
probably easier with PDF output (but in all cases it's hard to have a
printing system that does the right thing if you feed it the complete
file...).
But I don't see how this invalidates the argument that a system-wide
default paper makes no sense. In most cases, a per-document paper
setting does make sense, and the special cases are, well, special cases
which don't speak for a system-wide default.
> I think, ideally, the first stage processing (of .tex files) captures
> the page size for each page and that info gets preserved and used by
> later tools--without the .tex files needing to do anything like using
> geometry.
As I said, I hope future LaTeX versions will do that (maybe
ConTeXt does it already?).
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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