[XeTeX] Papersizes

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Oct 2004, at 5:45 pm, Robert Voogdgeert wrote:

> I'm using Memoir too, and I'm aware of the geometry-like 
> possibilities. Still I think it
> should be possible to typeset with the b5paper class option, without 
> using the setup you
> use. At least with LaTeX I never experienced and still don't 
> experience any problems of
> this kind.

I believe you can do this; you just need to tell the xetex engine about 
the media size to use *as well as* specifying the class option that 
affects the actual layout.

I tried a minimal document using
   \documentclass[b5paper]{memoir}
with both xelatex and pdflatex, and it seems to work as expected.

xelatex -papersize=b5 mydoc.tex
-> 6.96" x 9.84", according to Acrobat Reader (sorry, metric fans, I'm 
an old Imperial)

pdflatex mydoc.tex
-> 6.93" x 9.84", so its idea of B5 is fractionally different, but I'd 
put that down to rounding differences.

The position of the text block on the page is the same in both cases, 
aside from the slight rounding difference.

If you're using TeXShop, you need to be sure that it passes the 
-papersize option to the xelatex engine; from other postings, it seems 
that using the mechanism of "custom engines" may not be reliable, 
depending how you access them. That's a TeXShop issue, not a XeTeX one.

HTH,

Jonathan