In the US at least, 'letter' is the standard paper size. I think England uses A4. IIRC 'legal' pages have the same width as 'letter', but are much longer.
What happens if you print an A4 file on a modern printer is that it
doesn't print -- instead it displays an "informative" error message like
"load A4" and patiently waits for the user to give it paper suitable for
the file being printed. This is very confusing to non-technical users and means nobody else can print until the job is manually cancelled on the printer (once somebody notices the problem).
Why is it necessary to override the default paper size in the first place? Do TeX installations use 'letter' by default even in non-US locales?
On my system LaTeX uses by default the paper format A4, so hopefully it will use USletter on US systems.
It was new for me that the USA don't use the ISO standard.
But I tried to reproduce your problem and printed the Userguide in USletter format on A4 without any problems. And USletter is 6mm wider than A4, so I wonder why you have such problems.
OK, I provided a new version, named UserguidePDF that could be found at
http://fkurth.de/uwest/LyX/userguide/ or http://wiki.lyx.org/uploads/LyX/UserGuidePDF.lyx
I changed the following in comparison to UserguideA4PDFv2:
- use LaTeX's default paper size instead of A4 - don't use babel - delete the preamble stuff about the vertical table spacing - remove the unneeded page break after the TOC (proposed by Christian) - added short title to 3.4.5.3 Example #3: Labels, Levels and other list environments (proposed by Christian) - another try at new sentence in 4.3 abt. figure transformation and the table caption (not proposed by Christian ;-) )
@JeanMarc: It's not necessary to have it in LyX 1.3.5 @Lior: Does this version works on your printer?
For further information, here is a short history of the ISO paper-formats: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/isocafe/link/papersizes.html
Seems that the ISO sizes are going to be the world standard.
Astonishing why the USA doesn't adopt it. (That's the same with the units: All over the world they use the metric system (invented by the french), except of the USA.)
Has anybody an explanation for this?
regards Uwe
