[OS X TeX] Page origin problem with TeXLive and dvips

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

Bruno, thanks for this dissection of the code. You are correct, we  
detect the default
paper size using

	PAPER=`sudo -u $USER defaults find DefaultPaperID \
      | perl -pe 's/^.*DefaultPaperID = "(.+)".+$/$1/; s/^iso-//; s/ 
^na-//'`

which was stolen from Gerben. This size is either "letter" or "a4".

We then set paper size with

	texconfig-sys paper $PAPER

as you say. Exactly this code was used in the previous MacTeX
with no problems that I am aware of. However, now we are dealing
with TeXLive.

For TeXLive, confirmation that this is the correct code seemed to  
come from
The TeXLive Guide TeX Collection 2005 by Rahtz and Berry,

	http://xml.web.cern.ch/XML/TL2004/texmf-doc/doc/english/texlive-en/ 
live.html

Toward the bottom of the document in the section on Post- 
installation, these
authors suggest

	texconfig paper letter

to change paper size to letter, remarking that the other allowable  
size is a4.
Later they mention texconfig-sys for system wide configuration.

However, looking at Gerben's gwTeX i-Package, I see that he now calls

	texconfig-sys dvips paper $PAPER
	texconfig-sys pdftex paper $PAPER

I've written Gerben directly asking about this change.

I'll happily make the change in the current install package, but I'm
worried about missing configurations and making a change without
fully understanding the consequences. It would be helpful to know if
calling

	texconfig-sys paper a4

from Terminal works, or if even from Terminal the two "subcalls" are  
needed
to do the correct thing. Since I use letter paper exclusively,  
experiments from
folks familiar with a4 would be helpful.

Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu


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