TeX problem? (might be PostScript)

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Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Date: 2000/05/17

> I'm trying to produce documents that can be printed on either
> letter paper (North America) or A4 paper (most of the world :-)

A4 paper has the dimensions (width x height) 210 mm x 297 mm, whereas Letter paper has the dimensions 8.5" x 11" (= 215.9 mm x 279.4 mm). As you can see, A4 paper is longer but narrower than Letter paper. Thus, to get a correct printout, it should be sufficient to set \paperwidth to 210 mm, \paperheight to 11", and \textwidth and \textheight accordingly.

Udo Zallmann

TeX problem? (might be PostScript)

I use the "psresize" utility (part of the "psutils" package, on your friendly CTANs). The man page says:

Psresize rescales and centres a document  on  a  different
size  of  paper.   The input PostScript file should follow
the Adobe Document Structuring Conventions.

<snip>

EXAMPLES The following command can be used to convert a document on A4 size paper to letter size paper:

psresize -PA4 -pletter in.ps out.ps

Maurizio Loreti

TeX problem? (might be PostScript)

I have the same problem. What I do is:

\documentclass[12pt]{book}      % Specifies the document class
\usepackage[letterpaper,
        twosideshift=.2in,dvips,width=7in,includemp=false]{geometry}

In other words, I'm using letterpaper and telling geometry to make it narrower, instead of using A4 and telling geometry to make it shorter. I don't know why they wouldn't both work.

Laura

TeX problem? (might be PostScript)

Postscript measures from the bottom of a page, TeX from the top. If dvips is told the paper is A4, it will start with a large vertical movement to get the to the top of the text. If you want the SAME ps file to print on both letterpaper and A4, this vertical movement needs to be less than the height of letterpaper.

Dvips will see to this if you tell it the paperheight is the same as letterpaper.

For the horizontal, both TeX and Postscript measure from the left, so you just need to be sure that the left margin plus textwidth is less than A4 size.

So I would either: set everything in letterpaper, but make sure the width fits in A4, or: tell both LaTeX and dvips to use a custom papersize with the A4 width, and the letterpaper height.

TeX problem? (might be PostScript)

    The iso class has a similar requirement. The specifications for the
text block are: \textwidth{160mm}, \textheight{221.5mm},
\columnsep{10mm}. Also \headheight{11pt}, \headsep{10mm},
\footskip{11mm} and the \topskip is is same as the document point size.

    With the "a4paper" option all the margins (top, oddside, evenside)
are set to 0mm. This effectively centres the text block on an A4 page.

    With the "letterpaper" option the margins are set to:
\topmargin{-9.4mm}, \oddsidemargin{1.55mm}, \evensidemargin{1.55mm}.
These values shift the text block so that it all fits (centred) on US
letterpaper.

    With the iso class you have to produce different PostScript files
for the different page sizes. If the text block were smaller it would be
possible to fit it on either paper size.

With the hope this might give you some ideas Peter W.