[tex-live] A few glitches in tlnet/tldev

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 11:31 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

> [...]
> Yes, I don't know whether xetex supports a sytem-wide configuration
> for paper size.  But I have no objections if it doesn't.  The only
> reason for adding the letter/a4 switch to the installer was that so
> many people asked for it.  My personal opinion is that papersize
> declarations should be done in tex documents, otherwise they can't be
> shared with people who have different default settings.

I'd tend to agree, if we were only talking about people writing
reports/papers.

Some people use tex only because it is required by the build system
for some source package.  What they really want is to get documents
that honor the global papersize setting of the system, but since that
seems to vary with the linux distro perhaps is best left to the linux
package manager's post-install scripts to supply the right value to
texconfig-sys, and to texconfig-sys to make the right changes.

There was a proposal to support a default papersize based on the
minimum width/height of a4/letter.  Then we could do away with the
texmf-sys paper nonsense and insist that anyone who wanted
something different for a particular document do it in the tex sources.
I really love ideas that result in less work and less code to maintain.

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