Comment 24 for bug 41147

Surely it's a bug that OpenOffice uses the Locale settings to determine the paper size, instead of the printer properties or /etc/papersize?

GNU/Linux is a multiuser operating system. Different users on one machine may have different locale settings, and at any one time, there may be users with different locale settings logged on concurrently. But the paper size is whatever is loaded in the printer.

Put a different way, if an American comes here (Switzerland) he/she will probably want to set the locale (for spell-checkers etc) to en_US. But he/she will want to print on whatever paper the printers currently have loaded, which is A4 here.

There are printers which have multiple bins which can hold different sizes of paper, so theoretically there could be a printer which had both A4 and USletter loaded, which would print either one on the correct paper. But in practice, nobody ever does that. You can't easily buy USletter size paper where I live, and I'd be surprised if you could easily buy A4 paper in the US. The common case (probably >99.9% of all installations) is that the paper in the printer depends on what country the printer is in, not on what language the user speaks/writes in.