ISO 216 vs U.S. paper

[Callum Lerwick]

On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 18:44 +0200, Pekka Pietikainen wrote:
> Note that LC_PAPER isn't a standard (except glibc >= 2.2 or so, not
> POSIX or anything like that. libpaper even less so, sure. 
> 
> Still, it's definately the way to go, why have an extra library when
> glibc has everything that needed. Patching libpaper to use LC_PAPER 
> if /etc/paper.conf doesn't exist (and even trying to get that upstream
> to do that with their libpaper) might be useful too, not that anything
> in Fedora seems to even use it currently.

The problem here is that paper size is *not* a system wide property or a
user preference. What really matters is what is physically sitting in
the printer tray. It is a *per-printer* property. In fact, a per-tray
property. Fancier office printers could very well have letter in one
tray, A4 in another, and a third full of envelopes. What about large
format printers? A single machine may very well be connected to an
office laser with letter, A4 and envelopes, and also be connected to a
poster printer with a 36in x 100ft roll of paper in it.

Anything else is just guessing. This really needs to be handled in CUPS.
Though I suppose there's still some value to providing a default guess,
there's the classic problem of creating a new document in a WYSIWYG word
processor on a machine with no printer, that may very well be emailed
around the world and never actually get printed. What's the paper size?
God what a pain in the ass...
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