On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Hartmut Henkel wrote:
On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 hutch@psfc.mit.edu wrote:
%These commands fix the pdf sizes to be in true units. \mag@fix\pdfhorigin \mag@fix\pdfvorigin \mag@fix\pdfpagewidth \mag@fix\pdfpageheight
if this patch should be implemented at all (the current way is much cleaner and more intuitive, as e. g. \pdfhorigin is handled naturally like any other TeX dimension, after the description in the TeXbook) then one should not forget that the list is not complete: There is also \pdflinkmargin, \pdfdestmargin, and \pdfthreadmargin to be modified.
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 patch does not affect "the current way" at all, as far as I can see. It simply corrects erroneous values that arise when magnification is used because they have not been expressed in true units. It also won't affect latex documents which don't use the pdf[e]tex.ini formats.
...and the sentence in the pdftex manual
"Or, you can preadjust the \type{\pdfhorigin} value before typing \type{\mag}, so that its value after the \type{\mag} command ends up at 1~true inch again."
This "tip", is of course an acknowledgement that without the patch, pdftex has broken all plain tex files with magnification. The point of the patch is to remove the necessity for authors/users to worry about the fact that \magnification is broken: because then it isn't! So the manual should presumably simply drop the tip.
would be wrong as then there would be a double-"correction". Any users having used this tip would wonder about suddenly wrong dimensions. I'll have to check my posters...
Ian Hutchinson