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Set Your Page Size to A4 For My DocumentsIndexBackground
This page is pointed to by web pages containing `print ready'
page formatted documents generated by Julian
Stacey. Typically pointer wording being:
In Europe, & rest of the world except USA/ Canada, (as far as I know, mail me if wrong) we use A4 as standard size paper. (EG for Resumes, bills, documentation, leaflets etc.
(British schools around 1970 used foolscap &
quarto etc, & British businesses used yet other sizes
too, but all the disruptive variety was later abandoned,
& In Britain, Germany, & anywhere else I know, the
basic norm is A4. We've all converted & standardised,
except the Americans, (& related niche users: eg German
banks in 2003 used A4 for leaflets, but still used 12"
(slightly longer) paper when printing using eg foreign
account software, or password lists).
As much public domain software is produced in the USA, it often defaults to USA letter size, others eg Europeans etc who adopt that software, need to configure such software to change from the USA default to A4.
I've even know a European programmer set his default
to USA letter when contributing his software to the ports/
collection in FreeBSD, (a
global free software project rather
heavy on Americans, some of whom stubornly wanted to impose
American Letter as default on new non American code, in
contravention of international A4 expectation.
)
Paper Sizes: (A4 is a DIN (Deutsche Industrie Norm) standard & perhaps listed with International Standards Organisation standard ? (but ISO's page seems intent to raise fees, rather than publish free standards to encourage conformance). A large table of paper sizes is in my modified sjrun.sh shell script for the HP Network Scanjet 5 Issues To Consider
Adjust Your ToolsGhostscript
If you are using gs (ghostscript) directly, it defaults to
USA letter. You can over-ride by using
-sPAPERSIZE=a4
Ghostview
Entries such as this may help: In file
~/.Xdefaults
with content:
Ghostview.pageMedia: A4
FreeBSD Tools Macros
Here are berklix.mk
& berklix2.mk
my Berklix `make' Macros, that include A4 hooks to generate
A4, not American letter.
I also have various patches to convert other tools to A4, once you know the tool you want to patch, you'll find the patch to the source code indexed here, & in my source directory. Postscript Analysis
If you want to investigate if there are sufficient A4
directives in the postscript document you receive, (Postscript
is also used as a common intermediate to generate my other
formats), here are some clues below. After you've read it, if
you understand postscript, & consider my
CV is missing a Postscript directive, I'd welcome your input, Thanks. This groff input:
.pl 9i .ps 50 hallo
groff -U -b -s -t -Tps -dformat=ps t.rof > t.ps
With
/usr/share/groff_font/devps/DESC
alternately containing
papersize letter
and then
papersize a4
with the 2 outputs differentially compared by
diff -c
produces as further below. Obviously the
%%DocumentMedia
is width & length in tenths of an inch. & one can
also see
/PageSize [ 595 842 ]
&
def/PL 841.89
diff -c output:
*** letter.ps Tue May 11 14:50:37 2004
--- a4.ps Tue May 11 14:51:47 2004
***************
*** 1,11 ****
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Creator: groff version 1.19
! %%CreationDate: Tue May 11 14:50:37 2004
%%DocumentNeededResources: font Times-Roman
%%DocumentSuppliedResources: procset grops 1.19 0
%%Pages: 1
%%PageOrder: Ascend
! %%DocumentMedia: Default 612 792 0 () ()
%%Orientation: Portrait
%%EndComments
%%BeginDefaults
--- 1,11 ----
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Creator: groff version 1.19
! %%CreationDate: Tue May 11 14:51:47 2004
%%DocumentNeededResources: font Times-Roman
%%DocumentSuppliedResources: procset grops 1.19 0
%%Pages: 1
%%PageOrder: Ascend
! %%DocumentMedia: Default 595 842 0 () ()
%%Orientation: Portrait
%%EndComments
%%BeginDefaults
***************
*** 185,199 ****
}if
%%EndResource
%%BeginFeature: *PageSize Default
! << /PageSize [ 612 792 ] /ImagingBBox null >> setpagedevice
%%EndFeature
%%IncludeResource: font Times-Roman
grops begin/DEFS 1 dict def DEFS begin/u{.001 mul}bind def end/RES 72
! def/PL 792 def/LS false def/ENC0[/asciicircum/asciitilde/Scaron/Zcaron
! /scaron/zcaron/Ydieresis/trademark/quotesingle/Euro/.notdef/.notdef
/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef
/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef
! /.notdef/.notdef/space/exclam/quotedbl/numbersign/dollar/percent
/ampersand/quoteright/parenleft/parenright/asterisk/plus/comma/hyphen
/period/slash/zero/one/two/three/four/five/six/seven/eight/nine/colon
/semicolon/less/equal/greater/question/at/A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O
--- 185,199 ----
}if
%%EndResource
%%BeginFeature: *PageSize Default
! << /PageSize [ 595 842 ] /ImagingBBox null >> setpagedevice
%%EndFeature
%%IncludeResource: font Times-Roman
grops begin/DEFS 1 dict def DEFS begin/u{.001 mul}bind def end/RES 72
! def/PL 841.89 def/LS false def/ENC0[/asciicircum/asciitilde/Scaron
! /Zcaron/scaron/zcaron/Ydieresis/trademark/quotesingle/Euro/.notdef
/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef
/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/.notdef
! /.notdef/.notdef/.notdef/space/exclam/quotedbl/numbersign/dollar/percent
/ampersand/quoteright/parenleft/parenright/asterisk/plus/comma/hyphen
/period/slash/zero/one/two/three/four/five/six/seven/eight/nine/colon
/semicolon/less/equal/greater/question/at/A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M/N/O
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