Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Margins and VMS/Unix TeX
Message-ID: <1988Nov27.131816.27260@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 88 18:18:16 GMT
References: <1988Nov27.014959.26521@radio.astro.astro.utoronto.ca>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Distribution: na
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 20

|Can anyone settle a trivial dispute that's going on here? We have TeX
|installed on both Unix machines and VAX VMS machines. On the unix
|version if you type in some tex stuff you get reasonable looking
|margins. Under the vms tex you don't get any margins, that is, the
|text is jammed right up against the upper left corner. \hoffset and
|\voffset are the easy fix.
|
|My guess is that the unix tex behaviour is correct, since the examples
|in the TeXbook don't mention anything about having to specify margins.
|The local sys_critter disagrees and says that the vms behaviour is
|correct since otherwise TeX would have to guess about margins (but it
|makes a lot of other assumptions, why not insert another reasonable
|default??).
|
|So, can anyone tell me what the correct behaviour is? Thanks.

The Stanford TeX decided a while back that standard DVI drivers
should place the origin 1" from the top and 1" from the left edge
of the paper. So I suspect both TeXs are ok, it's the VMS driver
that is heretic.