paperspecs(5)

paperspecs5

Paper size specifications

Overview

A CSV format list of the paper size specifications used by paper. Each line contains the following fields:

NAME,WIDTH,HEIGHT,UNIT

Valid units are: pt (PostScript points), mm, in.

A size may be defined more than once. Only the first definition is normally used. This means that the user's paperspecs file overrides sizes in the system file (see below).

Multiple definitions are also used to allow inexact definitions to be looked up by size. For example, the LC_PAPER mechanism available on some systems defines paper sizes in whole numbers of millimetres, which results in a definition for Letter size that does not exactly match the definition in inches.

Files

/etc/paperspecs

System list of paper sizes.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/paperspecs

User's list of paper sizes. This is prepended to the system list.

Credits

The original list of paper names came from Ghostscript 3.68's gs_stadt.ps.

Releases

Unchanged in 2 releases since Debian 13 (Trixie).

  1. 13–Arch

Bugs

The CSV format is restricted: quotes are not allowed; hence, fields cannot be escaped.

Author

Reuben Thomas <[email protected]>

From libpaper 2.2.8-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.