Hideo Umeki has published the version 5.1 of the geometry package. 5.1 brings just a bugfix for the pass option, but the version 5, released a few days earlier on Feb 12th, provides some new and very useful features:

• The page dimensions can be changed now even in the middle of a document. This very often requested feature has been provided by the gmeometric package before. Now you could write \newgeometry{…} similar to \geometry except that all geometry options used in the preamble would be disabled and the paper-size options like paper=a4paper, landscape, portrait etc. too. Those preamble settings can be restored by \restoregeometry.
• The current page dimensions can be saved by \savegeometry and loaded by \loadgeometry.
• There’s a new set of options to specify the layout area: layout, layoutsize, layoutwidth,
  layoutheight etc. They help to print the specified layout to paper of a different size. For example the geometry package would use A5 layout for calculation of margins but with the paper size A4 if you use a4paper together with layout=a5paper.
• The new driver option xetex has been added and is strongly recommended with XeLaTeX. The driver auto-detection routine has been improved, the workaround with geometry.cfg in TeX Live is no longer necessary.
• Papersize presets b0j to b6j for JIS (Japanese Industrial Standards) B-series have been added.
• If the margin would not be completely specified version 5 behaves differently now in order to determine the unspecified margin, documented in the manual.
• The option showframe will cause the page frames to be shown on every page.
• The new option showcrop would print cropmarks showing the corners of the layout on every page.
• Loading geometry.cfg precedes now the processing of the class options in contrary to the previous versions.
• The options compat2 and twosideshift have been removed because version 5 is no longer compatible with previous versions.

For more information visit

• changes.txt for a list of changes and version history,
• the geometry manual,
• the package information on CTAN,
• the geometry package directory on CTAN.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.