TeX Live and MacTeX ⇒ a4paper option in \documentclass doesn't work

[gioacchele]

Hi all,
this is my first post in this forum. I've searched this and other forums to solve this problem, but i could not find anything.
I'm using texlive on fedora 10, installed from the repositories.
I can't get latex to use the a4 paper size, neither with \documentclass, nor with the geometry.sty package.

I don't get any error messages from the compiler. Here's the output of the log file.

Any ideas?

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This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6) (format=latex 2009.3.26)  27 MAR 2009 11:50
entering extended mode
 %&-line parsing enabled.
**"/home/amir/Desktop/new file.tex"
(/home/amir/Desktop/new file.tex
LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>
Babel <v3.8h> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax, dumylang, noh
yphenation, arabic, basque, bulgarian, coptic, welsh, czech, slovak, german, ng
erman, danish, esperanto, spanish, catalan, galician, estonian, farsi, finnish,
 french, greek, monogreek, ancientgreek, croatian, hungarian, interlingua, ibyc
us, indonesian, icelandic, italian, latin, mongolian, dutch, norsk, polish, por
tuguese, pinyin, romanian, russian, slovenian, uppersorbian, serbian, swedish, 
turkish, ukenglish, ukrainian, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/report.cls
Document Class: report 2005/09/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size12.clo
File: size12.clo 2005/09/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX file (size option)
)
\c@part=\count79
\c@chapter=\count80
\c@section=\count81
\c@subsection=\count82
\c@subsubsection=\count83
\c@paragraph=\count84
\c@subparagraph=\count85
\c@figure=\count86
\c@table=\count87
\abovecaptionskip=\skip41
\belowcaptionskip=\skip42
\bibindent=\dimen102
)
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/inputenc.sty
Package: inputenc 2006/05/05 v1.1b Input encoding file
\inpenc@prehook=\toks14
\inpenc@posthook=\toks15
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/utf8.def
File: utf8.def 2006/03/30 v1.1i UTF-8 support for inputenc
Now handling font encoding OML ...
... no UTF-8 mapping file for font encoding OML
Now handling font encoding T1 ...
 
 
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[Keta]

Could you provide us with a minimal working example? It's hard to know what happens without having the source of the problem.

[gioacchele]

The problem occurs with every document.
For example, with this one:

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Code, edit and compile here:

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\documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[italian]{babel}
\begin{document}
\title{prova}
\author{Amir}
\date{\today}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\section{Capitolo di prova}
blablabla
\section{Sezione}
bla
\section{Altro capitolo di prova}
blabka
\end{document}
 
 
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Run LaTeX here

[josephwright]

How do you determine your document size? What is your workflow: do you use pdflatex to make a PDF directly or do you go via a DVI?

[gioacchele]

Hi Joseph,

thanks, pdflatex works properly!

I was using latex to make the dvi file, and dvipdf to make dvi. The output of the pdf is always US letter. I can't check the dvi, as evince can't open dvi files, prompting this error:

Unable to open document
File type TeX DVI document (application/x-dvi) is not supported

So i'll use pdflatex now, but i'm curious to know why i can't produce a4 documents with the other workflow.

[phi]

I can't check the dvi, as evince can't open dvi files, prompting this error:

That is quite weird because evince does support DVI files.

So i'll use pdflatex now, but i'm curious to know why i can't produce a4 documents with the other workflow.

You can, but you have to specify the paper size explicitly as there is no notion of "paper size" in the DVI format:

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latex foo.tex
dvips -t a4 foo.dvi
ps2pdf foo.ps
 
 
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TeX Live (at least version 2008) allows to change the default paper size. But if you want to produce PDFs and don't need PostScript-specific features like PSTricks, pdflatex is usually the way to go.