[XeTeX] Ubuntu Dapper A4 vs letter problem

[Jacob Marble]

Thanks, Jonathan (and everyone else).  For reference, under Ubuntu
Dapper the file /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/dvipdfmx.cfg on line
43, I changed:

p a4

to:

p letter

and now I get 8.5" x 11" PDFs.  And ya, I would like to switch to TeXLive soon.

Jake

On 6/20/07, Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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Jacob Marble
435 760 4321
jacobmarble at gmail.com