paper options

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi,

as David wrote, many packages set the paper size and do not read the
default settings. Some of them have good reason for doing that. Not
all packages send the settings from the macros to the output driver.
This means that you should never rely on the default settings,
anything can happen. If you do not take care yourself, believe to the
default and send the output to a phototypesetter, it can cost you a
lot of money. It happened to me but they warned me that the settings
is incorrect and asked me to fix it. Thus I lost some time, not money.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz

pá 21. 5. 2021 v 17:43 odesílatel Nelson H. F. Beebe
<beebe at math.utah.edu> napsal:
>
> David Carlisle responded to questions about paper size options in TeX,
> and noted that there is no simple answer.  I concur, and wrote about
> the problem here:
>
>         http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/doc/latex-overview/index.html#Page%20layout%20and%20document%20printing
>
> With TeX Live, and some Debian-family distributions, changing default
> paper types is easy, and described in that document section.
>
> With most other TeXware distributions, there is, frankly, a hideous
> mess, with several files that need manual patching, and such changes
> might be lost on the next system update.
>
> If you have to make such changes on your system by manual patches, you
> also have to regenerate the affected *.fmt files.  Unfortunately, many
> O/S distributions have commented out configuration file lines that
> would normally cuases particular format files to be remade.  You then
> have to find those configuration files and their hidden lines,
> uncomment them, and rerun the format-file regeneration.
>
> At my site, all TeX engine formats are enabled, and there are more
> than 50 of them in our 2019, 2020, and 2021 TeX Live trees.  However,
> a single user on a personal machine might need fewer than half dozen
> *.fmt files.
>
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