On Sun, 12 Feb 2006, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
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.
I don't know where you get the idea that dvi does not know anything about page dimensions. It is clearly quite erroneous. TeX itself does specify its offsets, and dvips etc specify their pages sizes in accordance with settings that need to be compatible with the extent of the text (i.e. \hsize, \vsize).
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).
This comment, like many from others, misses the point. TeX is an archival representation of scientific documents. That is a major strength. TeX is not just a computer tool for producing new documents. You undermine the value of TeX if you abandon for no reason backward compatibility. Your opinions or those of others about the advisability of using magnification for new documents are not the issue at hand. Nothing in the patch I have offered affects any document that follows your advice and does not use magnification. The patch simply fixes those that do use it, whether new or old. I won't argue with opinionated pronouncements about features of TeX that appear redundant or troublesome. I could make pronouncements of my own about other such features. However, I will continue to say loudly, that until a patch like this is applied, the latest version of pdftex has broken plain tex files for no good reason. That is a bad thing, and since the fix is so easy, it should be fixed ASAP.
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)
The format I have proposed to patch is not plain, but pdftex.ini. The plain.fmt never enters into consideration. plain is not being patched. A pdftex-specific file is being patched. Ian Hutchinson