Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [was: What can cause printer to crop top of page?] /etc/papersize is ignored

[Wols Lists <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 29/12/17 16:13, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> The only "correct" place for papersize nowadays is in whatever the user
> is using to get something to print. And there are lots of those.
> Something like CUPS ought to make it all so much easier but I find CUPS
> just makes my life insanely difficult. So I mail my docs to my wife and
> she prints them from Windows for me

Exactly!

I think the problem is all the layers of indirection and pipes. If you
*pipe* a print job, it is very difficult to pass metadata such as
papersize along. So the only place the printing back end can get this
information from is the defaults. And if you've got something like a
photo-printer when half the time the paper is different from the
default, you're up a gum tree ... and of course you can't have the app
change the defaults because you can't guarantee that by the time that
job hits the printer some other app hasn't come along and changed them
to something different ...

It would be fine, of course, if all apps used the CUPS printer dialog,
but my experience is that a lot of cross-platform apps use their own
because CUPS isn't there for a lot of their target market ... on Windows
they can guarantee the windows dialog, on Apple they can guarantee CUPS,
but on linux? It's *usually* - but not always - there so they need to be
able to cope if it's missing, so they just assume it isn't ...

(Plus, of course, so much development is done for the American market,
so they don't realise how hard it is to get a change like A4 to stick :-(

Cheers,
Wol