[XeTeX] Fix for B5paper and B5 vs. B5paper question

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Oct 2004, at 9:51 pm, Robert Voogdgeert wrote:

>> AARRGGHH! There is a very good reason why it won't work as desired.
>> Having written the above, I just checked the xdv2pdf source and have
>> realized that the sizes it's using are not the correct ISO 216 'B'
>> sizes, but those from the Japanese JIS P 0138-61 standard, which are
>> different. I don't remember now where I originally found the paper 
>> size
>> data, but clearly I accidentally found a Japanese source and didn't
>> realize there were two different 'B' series.
>>
>> I'll fix this shortly. Apologies to all for the error!
>>
>> JK
> Jonathan,
>
>
> Does the fixing mean that one does not need to obligatorily use the 
> -papersize option for
> B5paper, and other standard papersizes?

With the update (coming soon: just trying to complete a couple other 
items as well), the option "-papersize b5" should give the correct 
media size for standard B5 paper (and similarly for the whole A, B, and 
C series of sizes), so you won't need to figure out the size in "big 
points" yourself. The -papersize option will also accept dimensions in 
a variety of units (pt, cm, mm, in, etc).

There's still not (yet) any mechanism in place for a LaTeX package to 
pass a paper size via the .xdv output to the final PDF. I'm guessing 
pdflatex does this using PDF-specific extensions in pdfTeX, and there's 
no equivalent papersize \special{} or whatever in xetex at this point.

JK