[tex-live] page size bug or problem

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Sat Feb 13 15:08:54 CET 2010


On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Rainer J.H. Brandt <rjhb at bb-c.de> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> after using teTeX for a long time, I have recently switched to
> TeX Live 2009 on Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, and to MacTeX 2009
> on OS X Leopard.
>
> My TeX Live has a default page size A4, but unfortunately it seems
> that A4 output is all it wants to produce.
>[...]
>
> That didn't happen with teTeX 3.  Using that, I got output files
> with height 150mm and width 100mm.
>
> That's a bug in TeX Live 2009, right?
> (I think a default should be a default.)
>
> Thanks in advance for any helpful comment!

Others have mentioned the geometry package, but as
you mention tetex a bit more explanation might be
helpful.

There have been many changes from tetex days.  Now
pdftex is used to produce both .dvi and .pdf output. With
tex+dvips, the papersize was contolled by dvips (perhaps
based on \specials for some macro packages, but usually
set in the dvips config file).  For .pdf output, the default
papersize is set in the pdftex configuration.   We now have
latex macros (geometry package) that allow you to
set paper size for both output formats without changing
the document.

You will need to take care if you have legacy documents
that assume pdftex is used only for .pdf output -- for latex
you will want the ifpdf macros.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia



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