A4/US Letter single source?

[Geoff Hart <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

John Cornellier is <<...making a template in Frame for techdoc. Ouput is to
PDF for eventual printing by clients onsite, either on A4 or US Letter.
Should be transparent to the client, i.e. no page resizing. Any tips?
Specifically, should I:
* use A4 (most popular) format and set text frame so that it prints in 8.5 x
ll, and what is the optimal text frame size?
* use a non-existant page size in between the two?>>

How about "none of the above"? <g> I'm not sure how Frame handles templates,
but it should be possible to produce A4 and US templates which differ only
in the width of their margins (A4 would end up with larger top and bottom
margins and narrower left and right margins than U.S. paper); you can do
this in Word, so I assume you could do it in Frame too. You'd end up with
two versions of each document, which might prove awkward depending on how
users access the PDF (e.g., if they receive only a single, localized version
on CD with the applciation, this would work well; it would be more involved
if they had to pick the right part of a Web site to download the docs). But
if that's not an option, then you're probably better off coming up with a
single nonexistant page size that will print correctly on both types of
paper with no twiddling.

--Geoff Hart, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca 
"The paperless office will arrive when the paperless toilet
arrives."--Matthew Stevens