On Sun, 12 Feb 2006, Martin [iso-8859-1] Schr�der wrote: .... [Sarcastic comment removed]
Please, file a bug for this at sarovar; this will allow us to archive this discussion (\mag et.al) once.
OK, done, since you insist.
I think I understand your problem, but the pdfTeX team thinks that the current behaviour of pdfTeX (as it was up to 0.13d and is since 1.20a) is the correct one.
No, as my report and original email make clear this bug is NOT present in version: pdfTeX (Web2C 7.4.5) 3.14159-1.10b, nor as far as I know any earlier versions.
Changing pdftex.ini should be done by the maintainers of TeX distribution (e.g. teTeX, MikTeX etc.); but that would probably break compatibility with newer documents.
No, it would break nothing in documents that don't use \magnification. Since the version of pdftex with this bug has only recently been included in TeX distributions, there are probably very few documents whose authors have been forced to introduce incompatible hacks to overcome it. The sooner it is fixed, though, the better. As far as where the fix should be introduced, IMHO, it would be better if the pdftex dimensions were all in true units, in which case this would never have arisen and the pdftex.ini file would not have to be patched like this. However, I sense that pdftex maintainers/developers wish to resist that, for their own reasons. If so, then patching pdftex.ini seems a reasonable compromise. Ian Hutchinson.