How to get metric and A4 defaults?

[joneall]

I find a good deal of inconsistency in the handling of Locale-based printer defaults.

My Linux system is installed in English. In System settings > Locale

Country is France
Language is American English, with French as second preferred language
Numbers are in the French format (123 455 789,12)

Money is euro (alas...)

Page size is A4
Measurement system is Metric system

and so on.

Yet when I go to print something in Libreoffice, Printer settings is still on Letter and I always have to manually pick cm, then A4 and adjust all the margins.

Aren't the system defaults supposed to take care of that?

Kate takes A4 into account, but continues to see inches, not cm. Ditto for Okular.

Also, in System settings > Printer configuration > HP Deskjet F4200 series > printer options, I have set "Media size" to A4, but on the job options tab, the Text options are all in something per inch! Does even the system not take into account the defaults?

Not blocking, but quite annoying. Have I missed something (again)?

[SteveRiley]

Re: How to get metric and A4 defaults?

System-wide settings exist for applications to use if they wish. But application developers have to write their code to take advantage of the advertised settings, and there's no requirement for developers to do this. The system settings that you describe below can't force their way upon an application.

[woodsmoke]

Re: How to get metric and A4 defaults?

joneall

I have noticed, and wondered about, the same behaviour. I guess SR's response is probably right.

woodsmoke

[joneall]

Re: How to get metric and A4 defaults?

System-wide settings exist for applications to use if they wish. But application developers have to write their code to take advantage of the advertised settings, and there's no requirement for developers to do this. The system settings that you describe below can't force their way upon an application.

This does not surprise me. You would think, tho, that specifically-Linux programs like Okular would take them into account.

Thanks for the reply, anyway.

[kubicle]

Re: How to get metric and A4 defaults?

What do you have in /etc/papersize?

if you have "letter", change it to "a4" and libreoffice should default to A4 size.

And if by "inches", you mean DPI (dots per inch), that pretty much a resolution standard in printing (even in the metric world...dots per cm would lead to some awkward numbers). Probably the same for rows per inch etc (slightly annoying from the metric perspective, I know).

EDIT: I checked the papersize documentation, and it seems the libpaper-utils (check that libpaper-utils and libpaper1 packages are installed) includes CLI tools for easily changing the papersize.

paperconf

(to show currently set papersize)

sudo paperconfig -p a4

(to change the default to A4)

[joneall]

Re: How to get metric and A4 defaults?

Aha. The paperconf command showed "letter", so I changed it to A4 (I said "a4" the first time and that did not work, so the capital is important.) and now Libreoffice also uses A4 pages by default.

Kate and Okular have always used A4, so I guess that each save their own default, rather than getting it from /etc/papersize. But they still ant to measure things (margins) in inches.

Good to have A4, tho. Thanks for your input.

[kubicle]

Re: How to get metric and A4 defaults?

Aha. The paperconf command showed "letter", so I changed it to A4 (I said "a4" the first time and that did not work, so the capital is important.) and now Libreoffice also uses A4 pages by default.

Capitalization doesn't seem to matter on my end, but I'm running precise so there might be differences in versions.

Kate and Okular have always used A4, so I guess that each save their own default, rather than getting it from /etc/papersize.

Kate and Okular are KDE software, so they likely read the paper size from KDE's settings (System Settings), Libreoffice (and other non-kde software), as a general rule, don't.