format control letter paper/ISO A4, pdf generation with -t ms

[nbehrnd]

I would like to convert some markdown files into .pdf. Because the content does not contain illustrations, however snippets of code, e.g.

`# a principal header

This text is upright, or italic, may be bold, or contain some
code{.verbatim} in the line of question. Here and there, a snippet of
a language like Python e.g.,

for i in range(4):
    print(f"The counter is on {i}")

Words like Ägäis, öffentlich, üblich, école, polymères, août, garçon,
citroën, œil, cœur;`

the submission of the block above as file minimal.md to pandoc (2.19.2) in Linux Debian 12/bookworm with

pandoc minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms

appears as suitable.

While pdfinfo (22.08.0) recognizes the .pdf written as created by groff (1.22.4), produced by ghostscript (9.56.1) in dimensions of US letter paper.

In addition to the functionality already provided, I would like to suggest a possibility to offer an export to ISO A4 which the current manual ([2022-08-22 Mon]) not yet mentions.

Alternatives ventured out so far to generate output in ISO A4 include:

• based on the suggest on stackoverflow

pandoc -V papersize=a4 --pdf-engine=pdfroff minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms

• based on the suggest on issue 600 though addressing pdfLaTeX as pdf engine

pandoc --variable=geometry:a4paper minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms
pandoc --variable=geometry:"a4paper" minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms
pandoc -V geometry:a4paper minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms
pandoc -V geometry:"a4paper" minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms
pandoc -V papersize:"a4paper" minimal.md -o minimal.pdf -t ms

however the .pdf generated remains identified by pdfinfo as format US letter paper.

minimal.md.zip

[jgm]

-Vpapersize=a4 gives you

.ds paper a4

in the ms file.
I think what you're finding is that this isn't enough to produce an a4 pdf. Perhaps we also need special arguments for pdfroff.

[jgm]

OK, this seems to work:

pandoc -Vpapersize=a4 --pdf-engine-opt=-P-pa4 -t ms -o result.pdf

I will look into changing pandoc so that the -P-pa4 is added automatically, but for now you can add it this way.

[jgm]

From man groff:

       groff uses the command-line option -P
       to  pass  options to output devices; for example, the following selects
       A4 paper in landscape orientation for the PS device:

              groff -Tps -P-pa4 -P-l ...

[nbehrnd]

I think what you're finding is that this isn't enough to produce an a4 pdf. Perhaps we also need special arguments for pdfroff.

I equally start to comprehend how the appearance may be tailored with the template files, too. Thank you.