Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> First, on RTFM: why would a regular user even think to look at
> geometry?
Because he's learned that additional packages are the only way to get
properly sized PS and PDF files, and geometry is one of them?
> Second, I agree that specifying a particular driver is ugly; it's
> just that at the moment that seems to work.
Yes, and I hope that we'll be able to change this so that it isn't
needed to specify a driver.
> Third, we've mostly been talking about geometry, a LaTeX package.
> What is a regular TeX user to do?
If he cares about document-specific papersizes, he can use the \special
command just as the latex packages do. Or he can resort to using
texconfig-sys or specifying the papersize in the dvips commandline.
>> 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?
I agree with your first argument. As for the second: The statement
"The proper solution is to specify paper size(s) in the document" is
true in particular because of portability issues: I believe it should
be possible to transfer a (La/Con)TeX document to an other machine with
an other TeX system and still get the same typeset output.
On the other hand, it's true that I use the same paper size most of the
time, and therefore it also makes some sense to have a system-wide
default: See the latest progress in #402994. But when one makes use of
this feature, they should be aware of the limitations.
> 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).
Yep. Please note that we've not tagged #402994 "wontfix" as all the
earlier libpaper bugs...
>> 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.
Yes - I hope this is going to happen with LaTeX 3.0. But not earlier,
since it's a change that somewhat breaks compatibility and will not
happen in LaTeX 2e. And the release of LaTeX 3.0 is, well, *very*
undefined. Something like "not this decade, maybe next".
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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