Page size pain / localisation / possible F13 feature

[Caolán McNamara]

On Thu, 2009-08-27 at 13:40 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> A great first step would be to go make a list of the applications
> included on the Desktop spin that support printing, and identify how it
> configures its settings. That data might make it clear what the "system
> default" should be, and efforts could then be made to patch the other
> applications to use it.

Here's my notes on how I've implemented this in OpenOffice.org to
determine the correct paper size, i.e
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/DefaultPaperSize
i.e. default paper size comes from in order of priority.
a) paperconf output
b) LC_PAPER setting
c) A4 unless LC_MESSAGES matches one the locales listed in CLDR as using
LETTER paper

I'm no great fan of paperconf, and I'm not suggesting its use here. It's
used in the Debian world quite a bit as their primary mechanism for
controlling this hence the priority ordering above, and it has ended up
in the fedora repos as well. But in the Fedora world I personally rather
see it as a no-op (and we don't have config tools which write to its
config files anyway). So I supplied a patch some time ago which is used
in the fedora paperconf/libpaper to make it take it's un-configured
default papersize from LC_PAPER making it basically a pass-through
affair.

So, all in all, I say we should be using LC_PAPER as the default paper
size when that's all an application needs to know (but if something is
already using paperconf then that's fine too as it'll just work). That's
the current situation for OpenOffice.org and GTK and anything that
happens to use libpaper/paperconf so that's a good solid basis IMO.

As to what territory uses what paper. I dug out various OOo bugs filed
over the years and complaints around the web about "my country is given
the wrong paper size" and a quick survey on this list and submitted
those results to CLDR, and CLDR 1.7 has accepted these modifications.

I've also filed a patch (maybe integrated into F-12 already ?, need to
check that) to get glibc to agree with the new CLDR 1.7 as to the
territories which use Letter paper size. 

All of which conveniently pushes any arguments about who really uses
what paper size down the stack to glibc and cldr.unicode.org and away
from the apps themselves :-)

>From my perspective all that's really missing is the suggested review of
packages to find ones that aren't using something that's eventually
backed by LC_PAPER to set their default paper size and then a nice
LANGUAGE/LC_* settings GUI to allow tweaking the individual settings in
a way that makes sense, i.e. the major hole that people fall into is "I
want my UI in English because my language translations are terrible, or
because I find English a more natural computing language", so "I
selected a US English locale", "This sucks, my paper is Letter, my dates
are weird MM/DD/YYYY, my currency is a dollar, and my decimal separator
is .", and spending their life battling their applications tweaking each
one individually to do what they want.

C.