change to letter size on teXnicCenter & MikTex

Question

How come TeXicCenter and MiKTeX always generate an A4 size pdf paper?

I reinstalled both MiKTeX and TeXicCenter and I made sure that I selected "Letter" to be my default paper size. Nothing changes.

Answer 1

The default paper size for MikTeX is contained in some configuration file somewhere in the MikTeX directory. You can change it by starting up MikTeX's "Settings (Admin)" program, but you probably already tried that. TeXnicCenter has nothing to do with it.

You can always specify to use letter size paper, overriding the default, by adding the letterpaper option to your \documentclass command:

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}

Answer 2

The paper size you specify is only used if your LaTeX document doesn't specify one. Even if you didn't do this in your documents, the class or one of the packages you are using may do this.

To explicitly choose your papersize either use

\documentclass[letterpaper]{scrreprt}

or

\usepackage[letterpaper]{geometry}

Other possible paper sizes are a0paper, a1paper, ..., a6paper, b0paper,b1paper, ...,b6paper,letterpaper,legalpaper,executivepaper`.

Answer 3

If you are using LaTeX=>PS=>PDF, then the following will work for you:

1. Goto Build->Define Output Profiles->LaTeX=>PS=>PDF.
2. Goto the Postprocessor tab.
3. Select Ghostscript (ps2pdf).
4. Edit the "Arguments".
5. Change the -sPAPERSIZE=a4 to -sPAPERSIZE=letter.

Notice that the size of the PDF is now 8.5 x 11.

Answer 4

Here is what worked for me, regardless of the documentclass or other packages used.

Right after \begin{document} I put these two lines:

\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}

\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}