On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 09:39:06PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote: > Ross Boylan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > .... > > Third, we've mostly been talking about geometry, a LaTeX package. > > What is a regular TeX user to do? > > If he cares about document-specific papersizes, he can use the \special > command just as the latex packages do. Or he can resort to using > texconfig-sys or specifying the papersize in the dvips commandline. A note on this in the README would be helpful.
> > >> But I don't see how this invalidates the argument that a system-wide > >> default paper makes no sense. In most cases, a per-document paper > >> setting does make sense, and the special cases are, well, special cases > >> which don't speak for a system-wide default. > > > > My point was two-fold. First, that a real solution to this problem > > will need to include a capability that is currently lacking, namely > > getting the page size from the tex source to the post-processing tools > > on a per page basis. Second, if the argument that "usually all pages > > in a document have the same page size" is good enough to argue for a > > document-wide default page size, why isn't the argument that "usually > > different documents have the same page size" good enough to argue for > > a system-wide default page size? > > I agree with your first argument. As for the second: The statement > "The proper solution is to specify paper size(s) in the document" is > true in particular because of portability issues: I believe it should > be possible to transfer a (La/Con)TeX document to an other machine with > an other TeX system and still get the same typeset output. I think I'm repeating myself, but the intent may be to have a document (.tex) that will conform to whatever the user's preferred page size is. There is also a practical issue in that the papersize is often unspecified (and probably, even more often unspecified except in documentclass, which is ineffective for many tools). > > On the other hand, it's true that I use the same paper size most of the > time, and therefore it also makes some sense to have a system-wide > default: See the latest progress in #402994. But when one makes use of > this feature, they should be aware of the limitations. > > > More basically, the point that documents may have different page sizes > > does not imply that a system-wide default makes no sense. From my > > perspective, it makes perfect sense. It is good to be able to specify > > a page size; it is also good to get a sensible page size when you > > don't specify one. (And, to return to the origins of this bug, it's > > even better on Debian if that default comes from /etc/papersize). > > Yep. Please note that we've not tagged #402994 "wontfix" as all the > earlier libpaper bugs... Hooray! Ross -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
