Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 09:39:06PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>
....
> > 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.
A note on this in the README would be helpful.
>
> >> 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.
I think I'm repeating myself, but the intent may be to have a document
(.tex) that will conform to whatever the user's preferred page size
is. There is also a practical issue in that the papersize is often
unspecified (and probably, even more often unspecified except in
documentclass, which is ineffective for many tools).
>
> 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...
Hooray!
Ross
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