On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 04:33:32PM -0700, Dave Kuhlman wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 03:10:16PM +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
>>> Documents generated by rst2odt in my locale should be A4 sized, at
>>> least by default. Currently it creates Letter-sized documents.
>>> See also the papersize(5) manpage.
>>
>> I’m not sure whether I even like the idea of reading /etc/papersize,
AIUI you should be running paperconf(1) instead, since then users can
override it, e.g.
PAPERSIZE=A5 LC_ALL=ja_JP.EUC-JP rst2odt x.txt x.odt
> A possible alternative is a special command line flag for page size.
> But, then wouldn't we be tempted to add flags for lots of other
> styles, too? I'm against that.
The standard PAPERSIZE environment variable obviates the need for
another flag.
>> since this could lead to a different .odt file being produced on
>> different hosts. Probably Dave has a different idea on this topic.
I strongly disagree; I feel that it is the correct behaviour for
programs to generate documents that are appropriate for the user's
locale *by default*. Since there are multiple locales, this will
necessarily mean that documents won't be identical when generated in
different locales.
PAPERSIZE provides a SINGLE place to configure the default paper size,
just as the LC_ variables allow the user to customize the default
language, dialect, encoding, collation order, etc. As a user, it is
incredibly frustrating when programs have to be individually
configured because they ignore these standardized settings.
> - The page size is stored in the style sheet. The default page
> size is ``Letter``. You can change the page size (for
> example, to ``A4``) in your custom stylesheet by opening it in
> ``oowriter``, then clicking on menu: ``Format/Page...``, then
> clicking on the ``Page`` tab.
>
> Does that seem like a solution that is reasonable and convenient
> enough?
This certainly isn't convenient for me, personally, because I do not
use OpenOffice.org. There isn't even enough free space on my
subnotebook to install it. However even in general I don't feel that
users should have to reconfigure individual programs because they
default to paper sizes that are not appropriate for the locale.
I'm generating odt documents for export to management, because they
asked for this in addition to the PDFs generated via rst2latex. They
want to send .odt (or perhaps .doc) to customers, because then when
customers make edits, managers can see what has been edited using the
dinky internal (to Writer/Word) version control system. The manager
then translates this from customer-speak into engineer-speak and I
make changes to the original reST sources.
It was only recently that I opened and printed the .odt on another
user's machine. Due either to CUPS or OO.org, each page was queued to
the printer separately, and so I had to stand next to the printer and
manually override the "PC load letter" request for each page as it hit
the printer, which took a good ten minutes. This made me grumpy
enough to report the behaviour as a bug.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
