Ian Hutchinson wrote:
It is not clear to me that those extra dimensions need to be fixed, although it might be good. What is vital is that plain documents that don't have reference to pdftex dimensions should still render properly in pdf, as they used to do in earlier pdftex versions.
The discussion on c.t.t. about this went along the same lines, and the main problem is that documents that use \magnification are inherently flawed. The DVI format (i.e. TeX) claims not to know about physical page dimensions; but at the same time it does allow you to shift and scale the content of the physical output plane. There is an inherent conflict there. Pdftex brings this in the spotlight because the PDF format does have a physical page, and its offsets needs to be specified. The magnification scaling stuff was nice when all we had was bitmapped fonts, but I believe anybody who still uses it in this day and age should be hit on the head with the PostScript or PDF specification (repeatedly). That said, I believe this patch is not really a bad idea, but one should change the formats name at the same time (it wouldnt be just plain.tex anymore) I thought these .ini files are maintained by the tex-live crew, btw? Cheers, Taco