PAGESIZES(5)

✨ PAGESIZES ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the pagesizes manual — it's the HylaFAX page size definitions page and honestly it's giving "quiet file that runs the whole fax empire" energy 👑

🌸 NAME 🌸

pagesizes — HylaFAX page size definitions 💖

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So the pagesizes database is literally the master list that defines the page dimensions and the guaranteed reproducible areas (aka the GRA) for all the well-known page sizes. And bestie, the GRA matters so much — it's the portion of the page that is guaranteed to be imaged during facsimile transmission ✨. It's usually smaller than the full page dimensions because of paper roller contacts and all the other mechanical chaos of the printing process inside a facsimile machine 🙈.

Every single HylaFAX program that needs page size info? Yeah, they all read it from this database, and they do it using a page size name. So when you prep your documents, the vibe is: use the full page dimensions, but keep the imaged area sitting inside the GRA, no cap 💅.

The system-wide default page size — the one used when you're preparing documents for transmission — is given by the `default` entry in the database. NB (and this is important, don't skip it): the default entry should be placed last, so that inverse matches find the real page size name and not the default entry. 🫶

The page size database is an ASCII file, and here's the format. Each entry is made of whitespace-separated fields:

name  abbrev  width  height  gra-width  gra-height  top-margin  left-margin

And here's what every field actually means, one by one 🎀:

• name — the full name for the page size; e.g. ISO A4
• abbrev — an abbreviated version of the full name, used in compact listings like the receive queue listing printed by faxstat(1)
• width — the full width of the page
• height — the full height of the page
• gra-width — the width of the GRA
• gra-height — the height of the GRA
• top-margin — the margin between the top of the full page and the top of the GRA
• left-margin — the margin between the left side of the full page and the left side of the GRA

Now, the format lore 👇 The first two fields must be separated from the subsequent fields by a tab character (possibly followed by more whitespace). Why tho? So that blank characters can easily be included in names 🧚. Other than that, fields can be separated by any amount of any kind of whitespace, no stress.

Numbers are all base 10 and in basic measurement units (BMU), which is defined as 1/1200 x 25.4 millimeters for paper output with a scale factor of one. 💫

All fields must be present on a single line — otherwise the entry is ignored. Periodt. 😭

Comments are introduced by the `#` character and continue to the end of the line. 🍓

Okay so how do lookups work? Two ways, and both are lowkey iconic:

• Lookups by name — done by sequentially scanning the entries in the database for the first entry that has a matching abbreviation or substring of the page size name field. The string comparisons ignore case, so for example `a4` would match a full name of `ISO A4` ✨
• Lookups by dimension — scans the entire database and returns the page with the closest dimensions, using a straightforward distance metric. But heads up: if the difference in dimensions of the closest match is greater than 1/2 inch on each side, then no page entry is returned for a lookup by dimension. 💀

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

hylafax-client(1), faxmail(1), faxstat(1), sendfax(1), sgi2fax(1), textfmt(1) 🦋

and that's the whole page, bestie — this one's from the File Formats Manual, dated December 5, 1994, and it's PAGESIZES(5) in all its fax-ready glory. slay 💅✨💖