Comment 5 for bug 393818

Bruce Korb:
1. You cannot use printer as the only source for the paper size. For example, even if I didn't have any installed printers, I'd expect following command to work:
$ man -t groff paperconf | ps2pdf - - > paperconf.pdf
Which paper size should the resulting PDF file have? Currently the output PDF file paper size depends only on /etc/papersize. If you don't have root access, you cannot currently change the result.

2. LC_PAPER should contain full locale instead of just paper name because LC_PAPER can/could also specify localizations for paper names (e.g. "letter" is "kirje" in Finnish and I'd expect this paper name specified by LC_PAPER locale).

3. POSIX locales include stuff like LC_COLLATE (sorting order) and (only in draft) LC_PAPER for paper size exactly for the reason that you may want to specify these differently. The LC_ALL is only a shortcut to override all specific settings.

Could you specify which program the command "./paper" refers to in your result display? I guess that's not a standard program because you referred to it with a relative path.