Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
First, on RTFM: why would a regular user even think to look at
geometry?
Second, I agree that specifying a particular driver is ugly; it's
just that at the moment that seems to work.
Third, we've mostly been talking about geometry, a LaTeX package.
What is a regular TeX user to do?
Finally,
On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 07:26:13PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
....
> > 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.
My point was two-fold. First, that a real solution to this problem
will need to include a capability that is currently lacking, namely
getting the page size from the tex source to the post-processing tools
on a per page basis. Second, if the argument that "usually all pages
in a document have the same page size" is good enough to argue for a
document-wide default page size, why isn't the argument that "usually
different documents have the same page size" good enough to argue for
a system-wide default page size?
More basically, the point that documents may have different page sizes
does not imply that a system-wide default makes no sense. From my
perspective, it makes perfect sense. It is good to be able to specify
a page size; it is also good to get a sensible page size when you
don't specify one. (And, to return to the origins of this bug, it's
even better on Debian if that default comes from /etc/papersize).
>
> > 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?).
>
I take it that modifying LaTeX to write out the specials (as is
currently done by geometry) is out of the question? It would be nice
if \documentclass[papersize]{xxxx} were enough to get the necessary
info to the post-processing tools.
Ross
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