[tex-live] Win32 run from DVD, customization and paper size

[Frank Küster]

"George N. White III" <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are a couple things that could be done:
>
> 1.  make the default "PA4" format (210x280 mm):
>
> "Note: It was proposed for an early draft of ISO 216 to recommended
> the special size 210 × 280 mm (a format sometimes called PA4) as an
> interim measure for countries that use 215 × 280 mm paper and have not
> yet adopted the ISO A series. Some magazines and other print products
> that have to be printed economically on both A4 and U.S. Letter
> presses use the PA4 format today. Incidentally, this PA4 format has a
> width/height ratio of 3:4, the same as traditional TV screens and most
> computer monitors and video modes."
>  -- <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html>,
>
> 2. use the locale information:
>
> _US and _CA --> letter, otherwise A4

I'm not suggesting to adopt our approach, but it might still be
interesting:  Debian has a "libpaper" which is intended for system-wide
settings of paper preferences.  Recently, it has gotten hooks that we
can use to query their settings in our texlive installation scripts, and
use the papersize information for format generation.  On the other hand,
if the local admin reconfigures libpaper, the formats will be
regenerated, too.

The only thing that needs to be done on the texlive side is to patch
texconfig so that it accepts all (or most) Debian paper sizes for the
global "texconfig paper FOO".  Of course, I'll submit the patch to this
list. 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)