pdflatex: fit-page-to-contents or scale-contents-to-fit-page

Question

I have a problem which can be solved one of two ways:

Typeset a given chunk of TeX in an "infinitely wide" space, then scale the result so that its width is the width of the page.
Typeset a given chunk of TeX in an "infinitely wide" space, then set the page size to the width of the result.

Can anybody suggest how to do this with pdflatex? Unfortunately I can't use other TeXes like XeTeX, etc.

FWIW, my document consists of several display-mode math ($$xyz$$) elements which are extremely wide, and nothing else. This appears to make the problem more difficult: many of the packages designed for this purpose can't use math-mode stuff in the detection of the proper page dimensions. — Adam, Apr 1 '11 at 17:38

Martin Scharrer · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-01 17:54:40Z

4

can be done using the graphics package and \resizebox{\paperwidth}{!}{<content>}
can be done using the preview package (or with the standalone class using it). You need to set the preview border to 0 for that. For overly large material use:
```
\usepackage[paperwidth=\maxdimen,paperheight=\maxdimen]{geometry}
```
to set the page size first to maximum.

answered Mar 1 '11 at 20:53

Martin Scharrer♦

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Hrm, neither of these work if the contents are larger than the page size. For example, I tried \usepackage[paperwidth=200in,centering]{geometry}\usepackage[displaymath,tightpage,active]{preview}\begin{preview} and the page is still 200in wide. Removing the \usepackage{geometry} crops off the sides of my content. – Adam Apr 1 '11 at 17:34
Perhaps I ought to mention that my document consists only of display-mode ("$$xyz$$") maths which are very wide, and nothing else. I need to set the page width based on the math -- there's no text body to use. – Adam Apr 1 '11 at 17:37
@Adam: You should have mentioned that it is display math from the beginning. Have a look at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/13981/… and tex.stackexchange.com/questions/13213/…. – Martin Scharrer♦ Apr 1 '11 at 17:52
Sorry! At the time I didn't know it made a difference. – Adam Apr 2 '11 at 18:18

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