Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:

> 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.

Frankly, we've had so little feedback from plain TeX users (or users of
anything else but LaTeX and ConTeXt, for that matter) that I don't think
writing documentation for them is worth the effort.  In particular since
these people probably have used plain TeX for years and know the
problems and have their own workarounds - and such documentation would
only clutter the "important" part for the remaining 9x% of the users.

>> 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.

I am strongly opposed to that view.  There's hardly anything that
annoyed me more when working with word processors like Microsoft Word,
than the fact that the document layout, page sizes, margins, or line
breaks, changed when the document was transferred to an other computer.
And I am sure that it's not only my opinion, but generally accepted that
one of the strengths of TeX is the portability between machines,
operating systems and (somewhat limited for LaTeX, even more limited for
ConTeXt AFAFIK) versions.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)