Tim Gowers, ace Cambridge mathematician and Fields medallist sent Dominic Cummings a memo on coronavirus policy and herd-immunity.

This would be off-topic, except that he used pdfTeX to typeset the memo. It probably used LaTeX. The paper size is US Letter.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/28/a-look-at-prof-gowers-herd-immunity-document-sent-to-dominic-cummings
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20792507/questions-about-coronavirus-policy.pdf

--
Jonathan

> Subject: Tim Gowers, coronavirus and latex (typesetting, not gloves)

If it's not true, it's well told: A scientist was once surprised when,
after a conference, his webserver became overloaded after he had put up
a page about the proceedings. Title: "Submission in LaTeX".

On 28/05/2021 20:14, Jonathan Fine wrote:
> Tim Gowers, ace Cambridge mathematician and Fields medallist sent
> Dominic Cummings a memo on coronavirus policy and herd-immunity.
>
> This would be off-topic, except that he used pdfTeX to typeset the
> memo. It probably used LaTeX. The paper size is US Letter.

I am delighted Dr Gowers chose to write in LaTeX, although as a
mathematician it's probably unsurprising. I am puzzled about the paper
size, though.

P

In article <ihd6i2F9o0eU1@mid.individual.net>, Peter Flynn
<peter@silmaril.ie> writes:

> On 28/05/2021 20:14, Jonathan Fine wrote:
> > Tim Gowers, ace Cambridge mathematician and Fields medallist sent
> > Dominic Cummings a memo on coronavirus policy and herd-immunity.
> >
> > This would be off-topic, except that he used pdfTeX to typeset the
> > memo. It probably used LaTeX. The paper size is US Letter.
>
> I am delighted Dr Gowers chose to write in LaTeX, although as a
> mathematician it's probably unsurprising. I am puzzled about the paper
> size, though.

It's the default. It doesn't matter much if reading on the screen. US
paper is noticeably shorter and slightly wider than A4 paper. The UK
foolscap is even taller than A4. So we are talking about different
sizes of margins essentially.

On 29/05/2021 08:01, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <ihd6i2F9o0eU1@mid.individual.net>, Peter Flynn
> <peter@silmaril.ie> writes:
[...]
>> I am puzzled about the paper size, though.
>
> It's the default.

I was under the impression that the default in current distributions was
A4 if the installer sees where you are.

Peter

In article <ihfol6FopjsU1@mid.individual.net>, Peter Flynn
<peter@silmaril.ie> writes:

> On 29/05/2021 08:01, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> > In article <ihd6i2F9o0eU1@mid.individual.net>, Peter Flynn
> > <peter@silmaril.ie> writes:
> [...]
> >> I am puzzled about the paper size, though.
> >
> > It's the default.
>
> I was under the impression that the default in current distributions was
> A4 if the installer sees where you are.

Could be, but a) maybe the installer doesn't see where he is and b)
maybe his distribution was installed a long time ago.

On Sat, 29 May 2021 22:05:42 +0100
Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> wrote:

> On 29/05/2021 08:01, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> > In article <ihd6i2F9o0eU1@mid.individual.net>, Peter Flynn
> > <peter@silmaril.ie> writes:
> [...]
> >> I am puzzled about the paper size, though.
> >
> > It's the default.
>
> I was under the impression that the default in current distributions
> was A4 if the installer sees where you are.
>
> Peter

Recently, there was a discussion on the texlive (thread
with subject `paper option`) mailing list where it was shown that things
are more complicated than one might assume.

--
Manfred

Am Sat, 29 May 2021 22:05:42 +0100 schrieb Peter Flynn:

> I was under the impression that the default in current distributions was
> A4 if the installer sees where you are.

The default of article.cls is letter, and as soon as you load any
package which actively sets the PDF mediabox (like graphicx, color,
geometry or hyperref for example) you get letter as PDF size. Try
this with and without color (assuming that your default is A4)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color}
\begin{document}
blub
\end{document}

If you reliably want A4 you should set it explicitly.

--
Ulrike Fischer
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/