[XeTeX] Papersizes

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 13 oct. 04, à 13:39, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> The default TeX origin, in the absence of \hoffset and \voffset, 
> should always be one inch from the top and left of the media as 
> defined by -papersize. Again, it's a clear xetex bug if a simple 
> "plain" test with modified papersize starts the text somewhere else.
>
> How LaTeX packages (classes, whatever) interact with paper sizes is 
> beyond my knowledge, but I think it's likely that in order to use 
> something like b5, you'd need to specify the size *both* to the 
> engine, with -papersize, and to LaTeX with some kind of class option. 
> (b5? b5paper? I don't know. What's the difference?)
>
> With pdflatex, there's probably a pdftex primitive that the LaTeX 
> class can use to set the media size, and that won't work in xetex. 
> Eventually, perhaps we'll get a pdfmark-based extension into xdv2pdf 
> to support this.

I've been looking briefly at the differences between page size and 
paper size, and at the differences between the behaviours of dvips and 
pdftex in this respect.

It seems dvips has default values stored inside 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/dvips/config/config.ps (included the 
precise meaning of the different paper sizes), while pdfTeX uses 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg.

In addition to these defaults, pdfTeX also has instructions:

\pdfpagewidth
\pdfpageheight
\pdfhorigin
\pdfvorigin

Beware regarding the latter: it follows the PDF convention of having 
the origin at the lower left corner, which is different from TeX which 
uses the upper left corner. See 
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/doc/pdftex/base/pdftexman.pdf.

Some LaTeX packages, including graphics and geometry, include code that 
makes sure these four quantities are consistent with the paper size 
specified in LaTeX packages with options such as [a4paper] etc., and 
also when [landscape] is specified.

Not sure how any of this could affect XeTeX or explain the reported 
problems, though.

Bruno Voisin