When testing printconf on a Swedish (sv_SE) system, selecting "Print Postscript test page" resulted in a printer error - simply because the Postscript page was in Letter format, and this being outside USA, that paper format is exotic to say the least. Naturally the printer had, and has ever had, only A4 sheets loaded. Suppressing the error message by fiddling with the printer did work but one would probably expect printconf to figure out that an A4 Postscript page should be used automatically (AFAIK this locale paper size info is also availiable in the glibc 2.2 locale settings). Also, the output Postscript page used inches as border measurements. Even the old control-panel printer tool managed to output the postscript page with measurements in metric units (centimeters) on a sv_SE system. Seems to me that printconf currently does not look for locale settings at all when printing test pages.
Glen? IMHO, this is a must-fix. Trying out printconf left me with a system where I can't print a single page without error from the printer (HP LaserJet 4) and having to mess around with the printers menu to override the page size of the print job... since the print jobs are in Letter format, and this printer is an A4 printer. Really annoying...
To make it more clear, this affects all print jobs, not just test pages.
What is needed is code like the one I append now.
Created attachment 9969 [details] source code for using LC_PAPER information
wow, this won't be fun to fix. I'll have to think about how to make this work.
This defect is considered MUST-FIX for Florence Gold release
*** Bug 27136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is almost landed. It brings with it many friends. I've made printconf configure generic options :) Though I need another day to finish it, icky gtk-isms. (But I'm not auto detecting locale, just allowing settign of ALL options.)
The locale stuff would only be good for _defaults_ anyway; it should be configurable separately from that IMHO.
I agree, but I think detecting clever defaults based on locale is important too. Nothing is more annoying than having to switch from Letter to A4 whenever you change a printer setting. Especially as AFAIK it's only the U.S. that uses the "Letter" size... such things are annoying americanisms to a large part of the rest of the world, and I think it's a good strategy to respect that the world is diverse and provide a default based on locale, now when the locale has that information, instead of enforcing a hardcoded default that the user in a lot of cases is forced to change.
paper size can be set, so I consider this 'fixed'. I will examine autodetecting, but it is not priority.
For your information, the Galeon web browser now uses paper autodetection based on locale settings. It works.
Could paper-size autodetecting be considered now? Anything but A4 is a brain-damaged default for this and most other locales, and that is why the default has to be adaptive.
It's not detecting the settings, its using them. Paper sizes are a bit wierd down in the filters. I will get this in for the next release.
*** Bug 53624 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is partially fixed in printconf-0.3.68-1: for pure PostScript, we now pick a reasonably sane papersize. For foomatic-driven printers this is a fair bit harder to do, since the defaults are chosen by foomatic, and they are hard-coded in the XML.
An attempted fix for foomatic-driven printers is in printconf-0.3.71.