Hi,
I have a paper that uses the ACM class "sig-alternate" and needed to
produce a PDF that uses "letterpaper" as page size. This turned out to
be surprisingly complicated. I eventually found a solution, however,
would like to discuss some of the issues.
It took me quite a while to figure out that all these "letterpaper" or
"a4paper" options one can pass to a LaTeX class have nothing to do with
the actual printer page size of the output media -- they just influence
the type area calculations. The printer page size is not controlled by
LaTeX, but the backend-driver (dvips, dvipdfm, pdftex, ...). On most
LaTeX installations it defaults to A4 paper. Depending on the
backend-driver, the printer page size can be influenced by either
command line options (not really suitable if using LyX) or by
driver-dependent /special-commands.
As I was using pdflatex, I added
\pdfpagewidth=8.5in
\pdfpageheight=11in
to my preamble and that did it. However, I would prefer an
backend-driver--independent solution.
I found two packages that offer functionality to specify the printer
page size independently from the backend-driver: geometry and typearea.
However, I was not able to figure out how to use one of these packages
to set the printer page size *without* having it to recalculate the type
area according to more or less nifty algorithms at the same time.
(With the ACM classes, the type area is anyway fixed and optimized for
letter format.)
More precisely:
\usepackage[letterpaper]{geometry}
messed up the layout completely, whereas
\usepackage[letterpaper]{typearea}
resulted in a error message that "current" has not been defined.
Any ideas?
Daniel
--
Dipl.-Inf. Daniel Lohmann (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter)
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Informatik 4
Martensstr. 1
91058 Erlangen
Tel : +49-9131-8527904
Fax : +49-9131-8528732
WWW : www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~lohmann
eMail : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
