Re: Selecting Papersize

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Damian,

At 2023-07-10T16:21:10+1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> Here is the laser paragraph from the Usage section of my User Guide
> 
>       All of those command line examples in this section
>       assume the default paper size. If one wants this to
>       be a specific size, say A4, then the two options
>       -dpaper=a4 and -P-pa4 should be passed to the groff
>       wrapper.
> 
> I would really like to omit -P-pa4 in the name of simplicity.

I tried in an earlier message[1] to cover the problems that need to be
solved to achieve this simplicity in a fully general way.

> When I run tests with this omitted,m every still seems to work. But
> then I only send to -Tpdf or laser printers with either a single bin
> or two bins which are identical.

That's fine and I'm glad to hear it--it's just not general.

> I may start using -Thtml shortly if I want to be able to get Grammarly
> to check my English.

Expect some exciting problems.  Maybe you can help me fix them.  ;-)

> Note that I did not define PAGE when I built 1.22.4. I ended up
> with a default of letter
> 
> Note that my
> 
>       /etc/papersize
> 
> says a4.
> 
> I believe my DNS thinks I live in  Australia and we use metric
> papersizes, i.e. A4. We use metric everything! We won't go there!.

What does your /etc/resolv.conf look like?

I think it our GROFF_PAGE m4 macro was written back in the days when
hosts had static IP addresses and did their own name resolution and/or
lived on networks that had names even if they weren't resolved by
bind(8).  (Once upon a time, people hand-edited /etc/hosts and
/etc/networks files...)

If your resolv.conf looks like mine...

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 8.8.8.8

...then GROFF_PAGE isn't going to be able to deduce anything about your
host's geographical location, and it will fall back to "letter".[2]

But, if you added the line

search esi.com.au

to it, I predict it will select ISO A4 paper format instead.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-07/msg00076.html
[2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/m4/groff.m4?h=1.23.0#n1028

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