[texhax] Bad effect when using xetex together with color

[David Carlisle]

Phil,

> For Plain users, yes; obviously they need to think about which special to use.  Now if "color.sty" picks up the page size set by the TeX Live installer and uses it to set \pdfpagewidth/height,

It doesn't do that.

> then that /might/ be reasonable, but I still think that a package that, /prima facie/, is concerned with implementing colour has no business interfering in page geometry.

It doesn't affect page geometry directly, but it loads dvips.def
(unless you edit it to load xetex.def or whatever.def, as documented)
and that loads all the driver-specific code that is needed for colour,
graphics, rotation,  page setting and any other things in core latex
that are driver specific. So if you have set the page size (using the
driver independent length registers)  by the time this is activated
(at begin{document} in latex or on loading in the wrapper for plain)
then the driver-specific \special or \pdfpageheight or \pageheight or
whatever is needed is inserted.,

So the behaviour is as documented and hasn't changed since this plain
tex wrapper was released in 1995.

David

>
> ** Phil.