[XeTeX] Ubuntu Dapper A4 vs letter problem

[Jonathan Kew]

On 20 Jun 2007, at 9:14 pm, Jacob Marble wrote:

> Hello list-
>   I am using Ubuntu Dapper with the dapper XeTeX package from the
> XeTeX website to process LaTeX.  I'm very unfamiliar with the TeX
> system and all of its components.
>   When I run xelatex on anything, the PDF paper size always ends up
> A4, not 8.5" x 11".  I found a program called texconfig and I have run
> it both as root and as an unprivileged user to set the default paper
> size to 8.5" x 11".  This fixed the problem for the latex command and
> also for the pdflatex command, but xelatex doesn't seem to look in the
> same place for its settings.
>   As an example, the following outputs in A4 with XeLaTeX, but in 8.5"
> x 11" with anything else.
>
> \documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
> \begin{document}
> Some text.
> \end{document}
>
>   Has anyone else encountered such a problem?  Does XeTeX not use
> TeTeX's configuration settings?

The xdvipdfmx driver will read settings from a configuration file  
dvipdfmx.cfg, which can override the built-in default of A4 size. I'm  
not sure exactly where that file would belong in teTeX; if you don't  
have one at all, installing a dvipdfmx package would probably provide  
a default version as a starting point.

I don't think teTeX's configuration tool would modify this, as  
dvipdfmx was not a standard part of teTeX, IIRC. So neither dvipdfmx  
nor xetex's extended version xdvipdfmx will be configured that way.

(Note that both teTeX and the XeTeX package you're using provide  
rather older software than you'd find in TeX Live 2007; for many  
purposes, this may not matter, but at some point you might want to  
consider updating. I hope there will be Ubuntu  packages for TL2007  
before too long, if there aren't already -- though they will probably  
be for newer versions of Ubuntu.)

JK