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Output drivers usually deal with some sort of hardcopy media. This media is called paper by the drivers, though in reality it could be a transparency or film or thinly veiled sarcasm. To make it easier for you to deal with paper, PSPP allows you to have (of course!) a configuration file that gives symbolic names, like “letter” or “legal” or “a4”, to paper sizes, rather than forcing you to use cryptic numbers like “8-1/2 x 11” or “210 by 297”. Surprisingly enough, this configuration file is named papersize. See Configuration files.
When PSPP tries to connect a symbolic paper name to a paper size, it reads and parses each non-comment line in the file, in order. The first field on each line must be a symbolic paper name in double quotes. Paper names may not contain double quotes. Paper names are not case-sensitive: ‘legal’ and ‘Legal’ are equivalent.
If a match is found for the paper name, the rest of the line is parsed. If it is found to be a pair of dimensions (see Dimensions) separated by either ‘x’ or ‘by’, then those are taken to be the paper size, in order of width followed by length. There must be at least one space on each side of ‘x’ or ‘by’.
Otherwise the line must be of the form ‘"paper-1"="paper-2"’. In this case the target of the search becomes paper name paper-2 and the search through the file continues.