Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 143661
TeX paper size should be set according to locale
Last modified: 2016-08-07 14:19:40 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041220 Epiphany/1.4.7 Description of problem: LaTeX and PDFLaTeX seem to generate output of the A4 paper size. This is not appropriate in some places. For example, in the U.S. the letter paper size should be used. The paper size used by LaTeX should be dependent on the locale settings. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Generate a document using pdflatex. 2. Notice that the paper size used is A4. Expected Results: If the system's locale is en_US.iso88591 then the paper size used should be letter. Additional info: Currently, the paper size may be set to letter by manually making the following changes: 1. Comment out in /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps: % @ A4size 210mm 297mm % @+ %%PaperSize: A4 2. change /usr/share/texmf/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg to: page_width 8.5 true in page_height 11 true in
Yes, this is a good idea. I keep making these changes by hand too.
Please update to teTeX-3.0 I built recently. There's a new feature in texconfig in this release that allows you to configure paper size directly. I think this bug is solved by this because setting of default paper size wrt locale is rather obscure. Many people (me for instance) use en_US.UTF-8 locale but create documents in other language that use different default page. The solution in texconfig is the best in my opinion. Thanks for the bugreport, Jindrich
I disagree with this conclusion. Granted, there are people with their locale set to en_US who want to generate, say, A4 documents. However, it seems to me that this is the exception instead of the rule. Therefore, I think that LaTeX and friends should default to the paper size appropriate for the locale and allow the user to configure it differently. When I sit down in front of a computer that speaks American English, I would expect it to use the letter paper size. If I sit down in front of a computer that speaks de_DE then I would expect A4. This seems rational.
*** Bug 167882 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I recently tried texconfig and I think it is a promising solution, but it is incomplete. I use dvipdfm for generating PDF output, and I see that the config files created by texconfig do not include any for dvipdfm, so it continues to generate A4 output by default unless I manually change its config file. I also agree that an ideal solution would be for the locale to set the paper size, but I don't see an easy way to implement that. Until a solution can be found, I would say at minimum that all of the config files should be marked as config files in the RPM so that if they have been modified are not silently overwritten by updates (see my comments on bug #158758).
REOPENED status has been deprecated. ASSIGNED with keyword of Reopened is preferred.
Should be fixed by tetex-3.0-39.fc7. Thanks.
Sorry, closed a wrong bug, reopening.
teTeX is now obsoleted by TeXLive in rawhide and removed. If you are sure the problem still applies also for TeXLive, please file a bug against following rawhide components: texlive - if you found bug in binary TeXLive utilities texlive-texmf - if find anything related to fonts/styles, noarch part texlive-texmf-errata - if you need to update font/style set.
Yes, this applies to the texlive package as well.
Under texlive, I reconfigured pdflatex to use letter paper by default with "texconfig paper letter". I still think it makes sense for the default to match the locale. This would require people who are "exceptions" to change the default using texconfig, but it seems to me it would work out-of-the-box for most people.