PAGESIZES(5F)

💖 pagesizes — the HylaFAX page size database, bestie 💖

okay so this is the pagesizes page from the 5F section — it's the lore drop for how HylaFAX keeps track of page sizes. sit with me, it's actually so good.

✨ NAME ✨

pagesizes — HylaFAX page size definitions. that's it, that's the girl. 🎀

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the pagesizes database is literally the master list of page dimensions and guaranteed reproducible areas (GRA) for all the well-known page sizes. and bestie, what even is a GRA? it's the part of the page that is guaranteed to get imaged during facsimile transmission. it's usually smaller than the whole page because, like, paper roller contacts and other mechanical chaos happen inside a facsimile machine. machines are messy, it's not their fault. 🙈

every HylaFAX program that needs page size info reads it from this database by page size name. so when you're prepping documents: use the full page dimensions, and keep the imaged area inside the GRA. that's the assignment. 📝

the system-wide default page size for prepping documents for transmission comes from the `default` entry in the database.

⚠️ NB, and this one's important: the default entry should be placed last, so that inverse matches find the real page size name and not the default entry. put it at the end, queen. 👑

the page size database is an ASCII file, formatted like this — every entry is a bunch of whitespace-separated fields:

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

and here's what each field is actually giving:

• name — the full name for the page size; e.g. ISO A4;
• abbrev — an abbreviated version of the full name, for use 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 the left side of the GRA.

okay now the formatting rules, because this file is a little particular (iconic of her, honestly):

• the first two fields must be separated from the subsequent fields by a tab character (possibly followed by more whitespace). why? so blank characters can easily be included in names. slay, practical queen. 💅
• otherwise, fields can be separated by any amount of any kind of whitespace.
• numbers are all base 10 and in basic measurement units (BMU) — 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. no half-entries, we don't do that here. 💀
• comments are introduced by the # character and continue to the end the line.

so how does it look stuff up? two ways, bestie: by name or by page dimensions. 🦋

Lookups by name are 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. and the string comparisons ignore case, so for example, a4 would match a full name of ISO A4. lowercase girlies stay winning. 🌈

Lookups by dimension scan the entire database and return the page with the closest dimensions using a straightforward distance metric. but — plot twist — 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. nothing. nada. the vibe check failed. 😭

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• hylafax-client(1)
• faxmail(1)
• faxstat(1)
• sendfax(1)
• sgi2fax(1)
• textfmt(1)

and that's the whole page, fr fr. this one's dated December 5, 1994 — yeah she's vintage, she's a classic, she's been serving page dimensions since before we were born and honestly? main character energy. 💜✨