Papersize problem with Latex Article Class

Question

I'm new to Latex so hopefully this is just a simple problem. I'm using MikTex on Windows.

My problem is that even though I specify the 'letterpaper' option in my class declaration (i.e., \documentclass[letterpaper]{article}), the pdf or dvi's that get created are set to use A4 paper. That is, I check the paper size of the pdf and its shows 8.26x11.69 rather than 8.5x11.

Latex does seem to format differently depending on whether I specify the letterpaper or A4paper option. That is, when I use the letterpaper option the resulting pdf has fewer lines per page than when I specify A4. However either way the PDF's paper size is A4, even when formatting was for letter.

The result is that I can't get a good idea of the actual letterpaper layout from viewing the pdf, since it's always displayed on A4 paper. I can print the A4 pdf to letter paper to get (I think) the correct hard copy output, but that's not really a solution.

Does anyone know what's wrong here or how I can fix it?

Answer 1

Try setting the paper size via the geometry package. Since you're already passing letterpaper to the article class, something like this should be enough:

\usepackage{geometry}

The more explicit way would be \usepackage[letterpaper]{geometry}.

If you typeset documents of this size more often than on A4 paper, you could change the global setting of the distribution. On TeXlive that would be done by invoking tlmgr paper a4 in a terminal, but I don't know how that maps to MikTeX.