[OS X TeX] Re: problem setting paper size

[Andrew Trevorrow]

Gerben Wierda wrote:

>>   % sudo texconfig dvips paper letter
>>   Password:
>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
>>   % sudo texconfig pdftex paper letter
>>   Error: value 'letter' not in list 'See'.
> 
> This has come up once before, and thanks to Karl, it is now clear what
> is going on, so I'll inform all of you (and have adapted my web site
> 'tex know how' info). It turns out that the personal texmf tree he used
> was also used with OzTeX at some point, and OzTeX has written a
> config.ps there that is incompatible with texconfig.

I just want to make it clear that OzTeX is not the culprit.
It cannot write a config.ps file into someone's texmf tree.
What actually happened was that Karl put a copy of OzTeX's config.ps
into ~/Library/texmf/dvips/config/.

The real problem is that texconfig seems to assume % is the only valid
comment character in config.ps, but dvips can recognize any of these:

% space * # ;

OzTeX's config.ps starts with the line "* See ..." which explains
the above error message.  (This is not an OzTeX peculiarity -- the
config.ps file in Tom Rokicki's vanilla dvips distribution and in
the dvipsk distribution both use * to start comments.)

I think texconfig needs to be modified to handle all cases if it's
going to read user-supplied config.ps files.  I will modify all my
dvips config files to use % to help avoid the problem (it's a more
familiar comment character anyway) but there are likely to be
people out there with their own config.ps files that use *.

Andrew

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