0

I observed a very strange behaviour of latex when it comes to the pagesize:

When I create a document in a5paper by just using \documentclass[a5paper]{book} then the output pdf seems to be in A4 but the printed area is A5, which results in a lot of white space or strange margins if you want so.

The following code produces this strange behaviour

\documentclass[a5paper, 10pt,pagesize]{book}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}
hallo
\end{document}

a5 that doesn't really work

The same happens for report and article. Interestingly, using the hyperref package fixes this issue. The following code produces what I would expect in the first place:

\documentclass[a5paper, 10pt,pagesize]{book}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepacakge{hyperref}

\begin{document}
hallo
\end{document}

I have also read that one can fix this issue by using the geometry package and in particular \usepackage[pass]{geometry} (with the pass option) to suppress the layout changes of geometry.

I am some how puzzled why the a5paper option isn't working on its own the way someone would expect it and how hyperref is fixing it. Is this a bug? Should this be reported to the developers? And who are these developers (which team is maintaining the standard classes book, report, article)?

Nathanael Skrepek
  • 313
  • 2
    the (rather old) standard classes don't contain the needed code to set the pdf size. This will perhaps change at some time (the classes are maintained by the LaTeX team). For now you will have to load a package. I suggest the graphicx package or geometry, hyperref adds the needed code currently too, but imho this is a bit awkward and it will be removed from there probably (I already removed it when the new pdfmanagement is used). – Ulrike Fischer Oct 02 '21 at 08:42
  • the answer I just linked to is the case with graphicx rather than hyperref but it is the same thing really. – David Carlisle Oct 02 '21 at 10:02
  • @DavidCarlisle the question is not the same but the answer https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/389951/143676 also covers my concerns – Nathanael Skrepek Oct 02 '21 at 10:45

0 Answers0