Bug#669369: texlive-extra-utils: pdfjoin (pdfjam) canot join pages

[David Firth <d.firth@warwick.ac.uk>]

On 2012-04-30 at 14:16, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> Excerpts from Frank Küster's message of Sat Apr 28 21:29:37 +0200 2012:
> > reassign 669369 texlive-latex-recommended
> > retitle 669369 pdfpages: "rotateoversize" mess with undersized pages
> > notforwarded  669369
> > stop
> > 
> > Dear David,
> > 
> > (please keep the bug-number address in Cc, so that the mails get
> > archived at the proper place)
> > 
> > David Firth <d.firth@warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
> > 
> > > Dear Frank
> > >
> > > Thanks for your message.  I haven't been able to check this, but
> > > I think that the behaviour reported below is not a bug.  The
> > > complainer is simply saying that the software does not do what
> > > he/she wants.  The answer is that the complainer should not use
> > > the software if they don't find it useful.
> 
> Oh, that will solve the problem completely, for sure.
> 

Great!  (But still some quibbles appear below, I notice.  I can't deal
with those here.)

In the README file (in the package, or online at
  http://go.warwick.ac.uk/pdfjam
it says
"All of the other scripts provided in the PDFjam package are
optional extras. They are simple wrappers for calls to pdfjam,
designed to perform some common tasks such as joining or n-upping
PDF files or to illustrate other features; they are not very
elaborate, nor are they extensively tested. They are probably
best thought of as simple templates that can be used for
constructing more elaborate wrapper scripts as required."

That's the key part of the documentation to understand, I think.

I don't think the pdfjam script itself changes rotateoversize
from its default behaviour, does it?  It's pdfjoin that does that.

All the best -- David
 

> > >
> > > I think that the behaviour reported here is as documented.  The
> > > complainer says that an option is undocumented, but that's not
> > > true.  It's in the pdfpages manual, to which explicit reference
> > > is made in the documentation.  
> 
> Where is it documented?
> 
> The --help text mentions pdfpages manual but does not mention explicitly
> where it is located.
> 
> The pdfpages.pdf file included with the package says this:
> 
> rotateoversize This option allows to rotate oversized pages. E.g. pages in
> landscape orientation are oversized relatively to their portrait counter-
> part, because they do not match within the contour of a portrait page
> without rotating them. By default oversized pages are scale and are not
> rotated. Either ‘true’ or ‘false’ (or no value, which is equivalent to ‘true’).
> (Default: rotateoversize=false)
> 
> I don't see how this implies that slightly smaller pages of the same
> orientation as other pages are rotated when the option is enabled.
> 
> Fortunately, the output of pdfjam at least dumps the options, otherwise
> I would not have the slightest idea this option is used. pdfjam sets
> this option to non-default value and does not document that or the
> option at all.
> 
> > >
> > > I am sorry if I seem grumpy about this.  
> > 
> > No problem - I think that you are right from your point of view.
> > However, some problems still persist - but that is an issue of
> > pdfpages.sty.  Therefore I'm reassigning the bug.
> > 
> > >> > 2) the pages are not oversized, they are undersized
> > >> > 3) rotating the pages is in no way useful since they are actually the
> > >> > same format (landscape). It would be only useful if rotating the page
> > >> > would yield larger page size after fitting it to the output paper size.
> > 
> > This can probably be reproduced with pdfpages in a LaTeX document.
> 
> Yes, I expect that since pdfjam is supposedly creating a TeX document
> which is then compiled into the bogus joined pdf.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Michal