Bug 53743

Summary: groff is hardwired to US Letter paper format, not A4
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Markus Kuhn <mgk25>
Component: groffAssignee: Florian La Roche <laroche>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Aaron Brown <abrown>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.1   
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Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2003-01-11 09:49:04 UTC Type: ---
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Description Markus Kuhn 2001-09-17 17:28:41 UTC 
Description of Problem:

Formatting a man page with "groff -man somemanpage.1" leads to a postscript
file that is formatted for usletter paper, even when the system was
installed outside the United States or Canada (e.g., in the UK), where this
paper format is unknown and everyone uses the international standard format
(ISO A4, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html).

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

groff-1.16.1-7

Suggested fix:
	
In the file /usr/share/groff/font/devps/DESC change the line

  paperlength 792000

to

  paperlength 841890

(paper hight measured in 72000th of an inch changes from 11 inch to 297 mm)
and in the file /usr/share/groff/tmac/man.local add the line

  .mso tmac.a4

unless the installation script knows that the system is configured for
North America only, for example because the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n
contains a line matching 'LANG="*_US"' or 'LANG="*_CA"'.

Markus Kuhn, University of Cambridge
Comment 1 Florian La Roche 2003-01-11 09:49:04 UTC 
I leave this for upstream groff sources to implement the
right strategies and they seem to keep to "legal" no matter
what language code is setup.

greetings,

Florian La Roche