Always prints A4 paper

[Sean Kelley]

Regardless of user settings, in Dapper the printer always gets sent A4. Even if I sudo on the gnome cups conguration it still sends A4 to the printer. I am trying to get it to always user Letter.

Sean

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Sean, please provide more information.
What printer model do you have?
What application(s) did you print from?

[bytefu (bytefu)]

I can confirm this as well. Printing a pdf, from openoffice, or from Firefox resulted in printing to A4 paper by default, despite the fact that my locale is set as the US, whose default should be letter sized paper. This was to a Dell 5100cn printer via PostScript and a Ricoh 2022 printer with the PXL driver.

Here's the relevant line in /etc/environment:
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

I was able to solve this by specifing Letter sized paper in the printer properties, but I also have to specify Letter whenever I want to print a document, as it continues to default to A4. Thanks.

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

I am having this issue on my system as well. The printer that I have is a Lexmark E240, which uses the PCL 6/PCL XL driver. I select “US Letter” both for “PageRegion” and “Paper Size” in the gnome-cups-manager applicaton. However, every time I print the test page, it is sending it to the printer as A4, and the bottom of the page is not visible because it runs off the paper. The laser printer control panel on the front reports an error—page is too long for paper—and after every “long page” that is printed a button has to be hit on the printer control panel.

I only found out that this was the problem when I inadvertantly tried switching to the E210 driver, which uses a different printing protocol entirely. The top of the output contained:

“$PJL JOB START
$PJL RESOLUTION = 600
$PJL COPIES = 1
$PJL PAGE A4 AUTO
$PJL BITMAP START”

… before launching into a stream of GDI that went on until I could reset the printer.

Printing pages from application software, such as Mozilla Firefox, does not work properly, either.

Another weird problem with this is that the top margin—no matter the printer driver or version of PCL attempted—is not in sync with what it should be on the paper. The absolute top of page is approximately 1" from the top of the paper, and left and right sides are about 0.3"-0.4" in from the side. The printer is capable of printing to the edge of the paper, so I am not sure why it is behaving like this.

I do apologize that I do not have any more data to offer other than this. If anything extra is needed, please let me know what it is and how to obtain the information, so that I can put it together for this report—this bug is really important to me!

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

A sidebar—I have always found it amazing that once you give up on something, the solution kind of appears right in front of you. In the <a href="http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=4235" title="How to change default paper size - Always prints in A4 - Ubuntu Forums">Ubuntu forums there is an answer</a> to at least my problem. The file /etc/papersize by default has a setting of “a4”.

My problem was fixed by:

* Changing “a4” in the /etc/papersize file to read “letter”.
* Removing the printer.
* Adding the printer back.

The test page now appears right, and all of the margins are correct.

This brings to mind an interesting question: Is A4 a reasonable default size? Or, is there a way to have a “country based” default setting? Say, a user designates in the installer program that he or she is in the New York timezone in the United States, should the setting be toggled to US Letter? I don’t directly know of anyone in the US that uses A4 paper, since Letter is the standard here.

[Clark Endrizzi (cendrizzi)]

I can confirm that this is still a problem for Edgy with the same solution working (which, frankly, is a terrible solution). When you edit the printer settings you can change the paper and it will stay without making an noticeable difference. This appears to be happening for several people:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1604721

[Sutram (sutram)]

I have the same problem. Mine is a HP LaserJet 4200n and I am using the JetDirect protocol.

I tried printing the test page once the printer was configured and setting it to letter does not make a difference. It always tries to print A4.

[Eddy Da KillaBee (efiggy)]

I too have the same problem, using an HP Color LaserJet 3550 using the JetDirect protocol. I've done everything suggested here and I'm still having the same issue...

[Russell Neches (ubuntu-vort)]

I can also confirm the same problem. Edgy always sends jobs as a4, regardless of user settings or print driver for several different models of network printer, using both IPP and LPD.

The same solution ('cat letter > /etc/papersize') "fixes" the problem.

I would upgrade this bug to critical. Ignoring user settings and causing behavior that disables a major subsystem for a large number of people (e.g., most US users) is not a bug of "medium" importance.

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

Just wondering if anything has been done on this to fix the problem. I noticed when I installed Feisty that the default in /etc/papersize was still A4. I cannot confirm that the problem exists, though, as I have configured no new printers with that setting—the only printer that I have is on the network and is shared automagically by CUPS. That printer works just fine with Feisty on the workstation.

I would suspect that if I were to configure a printer by hand, though, that it would exhibit the problem that has been observed throughout the cycle of this bug.

[Matthew Koyle (mgkoyle)]

this file is part of the libpaper1 package

[Matthew Koyle (mgkoyle)]

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libpaper1

and then setting letter changes /etc/papersize to letter as above noted in the above change

[Matthew Koyle (mgkoyle)]

this bug duplicates 71671: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpaper/+bug/71671

[Richard Wilbur (richard-wilbur)]

Installed Ubuntu 7.04 (kernel 2.6.20-15 SMP x86_64) on my Linux box here at work--a Dell Optiplex 745 (Intel Core 2 6300 @ 1.86GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD)--on Fri 20 Apr 2007. I have tried configuring an HP LaserJet 8000DN over JetDirect with PostScript driver and both Paper size and PageRegion == 'Letter'. Still the print manager test page and evolution always print to A4 page size as evidenced by printer requesting I load A4 paper. (Evolution used to allow you to pick a paper size and I can't find that even in advanced options with the new version.) The print manager would seem like a lovely place to at least display the default page size--if not allow administrators to adjust it.

I didn't realize /etc/papersize existed, much less it's overarching significance. I appreciate the note above explaining the dpkg-reconfigure way to fix this. Although, this is not something I expected to be broken.

Why do you have to reinstall printers after correcting the default paper size?

This fixed the print manager test page. Firefox defaults to 'letter' size! Evolution still tries to print to 'A4' with no visible way to override.

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 21:51 +0000, Richard Wilbur wrote:

> This fixed the print manager test page. Firefox defaults to 'letter'
> size! Evolution still tries to print to 'A4' with no visible way to
> override.

It seems like Evolution tries to print to letter but is overflowing the
page... there is another bug on that; Bug #86426

[Douglas Moyes (aragorn-stellimare)]

I am using 7.04, this is also an issue with previous versions of Ubuntu through 6.06.

I have confirmed this to be a problem too when printing PDF files from other applications (xpdf, lpr, ggv). The problem is that the Ubuntu install/configuration process does not give an option to select the preferred paper size and does not install some utilities by default. While this is fine for those on the other side of the planet, this causes problems for those who have more expensive HP printers that won't print until the correct paper size has been selected in the tray. Notably, my HP Color LaserJet 2605n... It flashes "Please insert A4 in Tray 1" even though the PDF file is formatted for Letter and not A4.

Here is what you do to fix. As root do the following:
(yes, this has to be done in a root shell not with sudo. If sudo su - doesn't give you a root shell, do sudo /bin/bash --login, better yet, give the root account a password and log in as root)

apt-get install libpaper-utils #some programs use this library to get the paper size
papersize -p letter #this sets /etc/papersize to letter, you could also set this manually.
echo "letter" >/etc/psPaperSize #some other applications use this

All Fixed. Now you guys get to make a pretty GUI to do this in the printer setup dialoge box :-P

Another cavet I have is the default language for Firefox is set to en-gb, and there is no language options for en-us and en-ca, both of which use different spellings for words like color/colour, program/programme, center/centre, and so forth. But that's for another bug report...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for libpaper (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Michael B. Trausch (mtrausch)]

Uhm... Alright, color me confused.

There was a comment made on 2-Aug-2007 and, today is 21-Sep-2007. That's 30+21=51 days by my count. Why does the Janitor think that's 60?

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

This problem is solved in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), the Ubuntu Desktop CD installer ubiquity now sets /etc/papersize to match the selected locale instead of defaulting to A4.
Closing as a duplicate of bug #104160.