[texhax] Bad effect when using xetex together with color

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Fri, 17 Aug 2018 10:51:49 +0100 schrieb Philip Taylor:

>> Do you mean why they are set or why color sets them?

> Why "color.sty" sets them.  Surely pdfpagewidth/height have
> nothing to do with whether or not one wants to use colour — I set
> them as a matter of course in all my Plain XeTeX source files,
> and LaTeX users would surely expect them to be set by (e.g.,)
> "geometry.sty" 

geometry sets the values too, as does hyperref, and the KOMA-classes
and other classes and probably more packages. 

But geometry is less used than graphicx, and it is not maintained by
the latex team. 

> or by TeX Live based on installation page-size
> preferences rather than in a file that,

An installation preference is of no use if you want to set a
specific document size. 

> to all intents and purposes, appears to exist solely to support
> the use of colour.

The driver file contains not only color but also the graphics
support as you can see if you look at the path of the driver file:

... texmf-dist/tex/latex/graphics-def/


The current state of latex is that a number of things that should be
better done by the format directly (like setting the pdf page size,
graphics and color support) are still done by external packages. In
a new format this will certainly be different. 


-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/