[2041] in athena10
Re: TeX and a4 (Re: [Debathena] #131: dvips uses a4 paper)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anders Kaseorg)
Fri Apr 3 21:16:10 2009
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 21:15:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
cc: Debathena Trac <debathena@mit.edu>, jhawk@mit.edu, broder@mit.edu,
geofft@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <58E48F40-97B4-4247-9711-A1394B42236E@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0904032102310.6942@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> Also, if I'm reading the zlogs correctly, even when A4 documents printed
> successfully on letter paper, they came out looking ugly with weird margins
> (since A4 is 8.26" x 11.69"). Will such a printout be accepted for theses,
> for example? (Does it have 1" margins on all sides as per
> http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/thesis-specs/#margins?) If so, then fine.
> If not, I would hate to see someone print out a huge thesis only to find out
> the margins are all ugly and they just wasted 100 sheets of paper.
1. This may be a problem for the user, but not for everyone else using the
printer (e.g. it doesn’t stall the print queue).
2. TeX does not use 1 inch margins by default, no matter what paper size
you set. You will need to tweak them _somehow_.
3. Setting the paper size with texconfig does not actually affect the
height or width of the text on the page. So for example, if you compile a
document with no specified paper size or geometry under `texconfig paper
letter`, the bottom margin will be .69″ smaller than it would be under A4,
and the right margin, .24″ wider.
Anders
