[pdftex] Why are pages smaller with pdflatex?

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Ulle Endriss wrote:

> When I use pdflatex as opposed to  latex (with dvips) then the output
> generated with pdflatex appears to be down-scaled by around 5% (fonts,
> height and width of printed area). (I use acroread and gv for printing,
> respectively.) Why is this so and how can I stop it?

Platform?  I've seen this on Unix, so give a Unix explanation.

Check your acroread print settings: There is a box called `Fit to Page' on
the version I just looked at, and that needs to be unchecked (and is
normally checked). Acroread defaults to letter paper size and so shrinks
10.69" to 10", in fact also 7%.  You can change the paper size in the Page
Setup, but acroread seems to forget that setting.

Something similar must happen on Windows: my (US-based, Windows-using)
publisher reported my PDF files were 6% too small, whereas they printed
correctly in this country (from Windows and Linux).

> The page size produced by latex/dvips is the correct one, that is, the
> value chosen for \textwidth matches the actual text width, etc.
>
> Thanks for your help,
> Ulle
>
>
> --
> Ulrich Endriss              Tel: +44 20 7848 2985
> Dept. of Computer Science   Fax: +44 20 7240 1071
> King's College London       Email: endriss at dcs.kcl.ac.uk
> Strand, London WC2R 2LS     WWW: http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/endriss/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> pdftex mailing list
> pdftex at tug.org
> http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/pdftex
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595