Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 07:47:58AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Ross Boylan <ross@biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 09:39:06PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
....
> > 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.
Clearly anyone who wants to keep the page size constant needs to
specify it explicitly, and there is no way the system can do that for
them. My point was simply that some documents embody another view (or
the author just didn't consider the issue at all), and it would be
nice if those worked too. If your position is that documents without
an explicit page size should break, as a kind of disincentive for
doing that or warning that they might break elsewhere, that seems a
bit strong. Admittedly, such breakage is compatible with upstream,
but that seems a questionable virtue in this case. Upstream, at least
as embodied in the FAQ cited earlier, does not think the current
situation is a good one.
This point of principle may not be too important, since I gather the
Debian packagers have respecting /etc/papersize on a kind of "to do,
time and priorities permitting" status. If /etc/papersize is used,
that will mean that documents without explicit papersize will work.
Even with such a change, the situation will remain confusing for
documents with a papersize in documentclass but without geometry or
one of the other packages with appropriate options. Fixing that waits
on LaTeX3, although perhaps geometry will be modified to work without
an explicit driver.
Ross
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