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3. Paper Size and Landscape Orientation

Most TeX documents at a particular site are designed to use the standard paper size (letter size in the United States, A4 in Europe.) The dvips program defaults to these paper sizes and can be customized for the defaults at each site or on each printer.

But many documents are designed for other paper sizes. For instance, you may want to design a document that has the long edge of the paper horizontal. This can be useful when typesetting booklets, brochures, complex tables, or many other documents. This type of paper orientation is called landscape orientation (the `normal' orientation is portrait). Alternatively, a document might be designed for ledger or A3 paper.

Since the intended paper size is a document design decision, and not a decision that is made at printing time, such information should be given in the TeX file and not on the dvips command line. For this reason, dvips supports a `papersize' special. It is hoped that this special will become standard over time for TeX previewers and other printer drivers.

The format of the `papersize' special is

\special{papersize=8.5in,11in}

where the dimensions given above are for a standard letter sheet. The first dimension given is the horizontal size of the page, and the second is the vertical size. The dimensions supported are the same as for TeX; namely, in (inches), cm (centimeters), mm (millimeters), pt (points), sp (scaled points), bp (big points, the same as the default PostScript unit), pc (picas), dd (didot points), and cc (ciceros).

For a landscape document, the `papersize' comment would be given as

\special{papersize=11in,8.5in}

An alternate specification of `landscape' is to have a special of the form

\special{landscape}

This is supported for backward compatibility, but it is hoped that eventually the `papersize' comment will dominate.

Of course, using such a command only informs dvips of the desired paper size; you must still adjust the `hsize' and `vsize' in your TeX document to actually use the full page.

The `papersize' special must occur somewhere on the first page of the document.


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