[XeTeX] Re: [MacTeX] XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 15 Apr 2004, at 10:23 am, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 15 avr. 04, à 10:35, Jonathan Kew a écrit :
>
>> xetex -papersize=a4 is supposed to work; what do you get? Do 
>> -papersize switches have any effect at all? You should be able to 
>> specify a variety of sizes:
>> 	a3
>> 	a4
>> 	a5
>> 	b5
>> 	letter
>> 	legal
>> 	tabloid
>> and you can append ":landscape" to any of these.
>>
>> If you're running xetex with the -no-pdf option, to get an .xdv file, 
>> you'd need to set the paper size with the -p option to xdv2pdf rather 
>> than xetex's -papersize option.
>
> Actually it's not a papersize problem. On CM-test.tex I tried all four 
> combinations:
>
> xetex CM-test.tex
>
> xetex -papersize=a4 CM-test.tex
>
> xetex -no-pdf CM-test.tex
> xdv2pdf -p a4 CM-test.xdv
>
> xetex -papersize=a4 -no-pdf CM-test.tex
> xdv2pdf -p a4 CM-test.xdv
>
> and they all produce the same result, a PDF file in A4 format which 
> seems to indicate that the setup defined at the time the TeX i-package 
> is installed (I chose A4 paper) is taken into account by XeTeX as 
> well.
>

It's not actually coming from your i-package configuration; xetex (or 
rather xdv2pdf) defaults to the paper size chosen as the default for 
the OS X printing system (see System Preferences / Print & Fax). In 
your case, that's also likely to be A4, of course. If you change it in 
System Preferences (or was it somewhere else on 10.2?), and re-run 
xetex (with no -papersize option), you should see the effect of the 
change.

Note that -papersize will have no effect whatsoever if you use -no-pdf, 
as the size isn't passed in the .xdv stream. (I should probably change 
this.)

> It turns out that the problem I had reported shows up in plain TeX 
> only, and is related to \magnification. Try adding 
> \magnification=\magstep1 at the beginning of CM-test.tex, typeset it 
> with pdfTeX and XeTeX. It seems that, with XeTeX, the magnification is 
> taken into account when composing the page (i.e., calculating line 
> breaks, page breaks etc.), but not when producing the final PDF 
> output: the text shows up unmagnified on my screen.
>

Ah, OK. I'm not terribly surprised; I never use \magnification, so I 
wouldn't have immediately noticed that xdv2pdf isn't handling it. It 
shouldn't be hard, just a case of picking up the right values and 
applying a transform.

> I hadn't related this to \magnification because I implicitly put 
> \magnification=\magstep1 in all my plain TeX documents and 
> \documentclass[12pt] in all my LaTeX documents.
>

Thanks, Bruno; that's one for the "to do" list. Hope to have it fixed 
for you before too long.

Jonathan

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