Producing PDFs to non-standard page sizes

[Ganz, Frank, SV USA]

Hi John,

My steps are a little confused, I guess. Let me improve on them.

The easiest fix would be this one:

(1) Produce a PostScript file without page size specification!

Make sure that DVIPSONE is used when you produce the PostScript. (DVIWINDO allows you to create a PostScript without using DVIPSONE. When you do that, you would need to edit the PostScript to erase the default page size feature stored inside the PS. This would just be a few lines to remove. Again, the objective is to create a PostScript without default page size.)

-l=letter mustn't be used with DVIPSONE. Check dviwindo.ini, dvipsone.cmd or any other command prompt entries.

(2) Determine the best position for the text on the page.

If you know the left and buttom margins you can measure by how much they are off vertically and horizontally on a printed page you hold in front of you. Note, PostScript's coordinate system starts at the buttom left corner. Distiller will crop the page from top and right to fit custom page size.

You can now move the page around with

\hoffset=
\voffset=

(this goes before \begin{document})

both \hoffset and \voffset can assume negative values and any unit of measure TeX understands.

Once you've determined the best margins, go to step

(3) Run LaTeX again to create a DVI file

(4) Create a PostScript file as stated in (1)

(5) Enter custom page size in Distiller job options under "Default Page Size" (Acrobat 5.0).

(6) Distill your PostScript for the whole book

This should give you a PDF file with the correct trim.

Thanks,
Frank