[2035] in athena10
Re: cups.mit.edu and a4 (Re: [Debathena] #131: dvips uses a4 paper)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Fri Apr 3 20:43:07 2009
Cc: Debathena Trac <debathena@mit.edu>, jhawk@mit.edu, broder@mit.edu,
geofft@mit.edu
Message-Id: <3DBFF870-5518-497F-8992-B082E675E73F@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0904031942250.6942@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 20:42:46 -0400
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> My tests (-c debathena -i texconfig from Sunday) indicated that this
> only
> happens when printing using CUPS via cups.mit.edu. I was not able to
> reproduce with lpr, and I was not able to reproduce using CUPS to a
> different (non-Athena) networked printer. (I have heard rumors that
> some
> people may have seen different behavior; do we have any actual tests
> that
> confirm that?) If that is what’s going on, then it points to a
> misconfiguration or bug in cups.mit.edu, and not a problem with the
> clients or the printers.
I believe this is also printer dependent. The Dell printers will
simply print the job on the available paper, whether it's a good idea
or not. (Legal documents will happily print on Letter paper, for
example, and cut off the last 3 inches of the document).
The HPs, however, will demand the appropriate paper size.
> This is a separate issue from tex-config, and I do not think we should
> consider hacking TeX to be a solution to this issue; it is at best a
> workaround.
I don't think it's reasonable to call this "hacking TeX". texconfig-
sys is a supported method of configuring site-wide defaults, including
paper size. This is no more a "hack" than configuring Kerberos, Hesiod
or any of the other things we do.
It's worth noting that all the LaTeX documentation at MIT, and all the
templates, do NOT specify papersize as an option to documentclass.
Further, has anyone actually tested the \documentclass[letter]
actually does the right thing? All the documentation I've seen says
that dvips will happily ignore that in favor of the site defaults, and
you'll get PostScript that specifies A4 paper anyway. Additionally
note that if we don't specify the papersize, users will have to
specify it manually for dvips, pdftex, and xdvi.
I'm willing to accept that this shouldn't be in debathena-clients. I
have yet to hear a compelling reason why this shouldn't go into
debathena-standard, especially if the dependencies/recommendations/
whatever are specified in such a way that a user can decline it.
-Jon
