[Date Prev][Date Next]
[Chronological]
[Thread]
[Top]
Re: Guide PDF changes
Kari Mattsson writes:
>> Maybe you should choose the smaller paper size?
Neither is. A4 is 18mm longer, but Letter is 6mm wider:-(
A4 210 * 297 mm
US Letter 216 * 279 mm
Canadian P4 215 * 280 mm
I was hoping that the fact the US way had not won meant Letter caused
problems for A4 printers but not vice versa, but apparently not.
> I've had some success by creating hybrid paper size of A4 width
> (210 mm), and Letter height (some inches). That is, take the
> smaller values of both. That way the printers (atleast some)
> seem to be happier. Most new printers seem to be able to scale
> between A4 and Letter.
Looking around, I found even an RFC which recommends that. RFC 2346
("Making Postscript and PDF International"): Use A4 with 33mm top/bottom
margins, or Letter with 21(?)mm left, 26mm right margin. (His advise is
not quite consistent.) So it looks like the sizes are the only problem,
not paper size names or whatever in addition.
'make A4' and 'make letter' would be another variant (or some extra
Makefile lines).
Howard Chu writes:
> And yes, we use Letter size in the US. I wonder if we could key off
> "AC_LANG=en_US" or somesuch...
Nope. Locale names are not standardized, and I'm in any case writing
this on host with LANG=en_US (but LC_CTYPE=no_NO). Our site's setup is
something like this:
linux rs6000) LANG=en_US LC_CTYPE=no_NO
sgi) LANG=en_US LC_CTYPE=en_US
ds vax) LANG=ENG_GB.8859
hp*) LANG=C.iso88591
solaris sun*) LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1
alpha) LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1
*Good* native language support is nice, in particular to someone who
doesn't understand English well. But it's not an improvement when a
standard utility outputs 8-bit Norwegian to a program which expects
7-bit ASCII, or with poor translations (which are common), or Norwegian
and English text intertwined because the translation is outdated.
Presumably the situation is better for languages spoken by more people.
--
Regards,
Hallvard