[1506] in SIPB bug reports
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Thu Dec 6 15:15:02 1990
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 90 15:14:53 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: bug-sipb-mtg@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
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554 bug-sipb-mtg@bloom-beacon.mit.edu... Remote protocol error: Bad file number
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Date: Thu, 6 Dec 90 02:50:13 -0500
From: Mark W. Eichin <eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Message-Id: <9012060750.AA23597@portnoy.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: tex-hackers@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Subject: letter.sty + dvi2ps
A user was using the letter style to produce form letters, with
repeated \begin{letter} \input{letterbody} \end{letter}, and tried to
use dvi2ps to select 10 pages to print them.
Unfortunately, \begin{letter} resets the TeX page number to
\@ne (one, 1) and dvi2ps uses the TeX page count to decide whether to
print a given page. There was no way they could select any individual
sections of the collection - dvi2ps would either output no pages at
all, or all 125 pages.
The possible places that this could be considered "broken":
1) letter.sty should have pagestyle{plain} (?) so that the
numbers don't matter, and thus it need not reset them
2) dvi2ps should have a way of selecting pages in their own
right, instead of as they are "labelled".
3) dvi2ps could also have warned explicitly that no pages were
selected.
_Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
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