Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
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. 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).
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.
Even a command line paper size specification won't help if there is
more than one paper size in the document.
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.
Ross
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