Fedora-17 Irritations

[Tim]

On Fri, 2012-04-20 at 12:09 -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:
> It seems to me that you could have a situation in which libreoffice
> believes in A4, but the printer still believes in Letter.
>  
> When I had application/printer mismatch problems,
> it was usually because the application
> believed in A4 and the printer in Letter.

I used to have that problem, *years* ago.  Where my locale *only* uses
A4, I'd correctly set the system to my locale, *and* I'd have to set up
printer configurations correctly for the paper that I put in the
printer.  

Ideally, setting your locale would set the default page type used where
you live, somewhere to the system configuration, and everything else
would use that as its defaults (printer configuration, word processors,
web browsers, etc.).

But *every* damn application would ignore the printer settings and
require individually setting to A4.  Some applications required
constantly resetting, since they seem to take the creation of each new
document to need resetting to its own defaults.  *And* to make things
even worse, each user would require their settings to be customised, or
they'd be trying to print to the wrong paper size (which produces all
sorts of annoying printing problems).

Occasionally I'd hear about the opposite (A4 versus Letter) page sizing
from other people, over the years, and wondered:

      * Had they ever set the locale to their area?  (Doing so sets up
        all manner of parameters that will need to be customised to suit
        them, languages, punctuation rules, monetary systems, timezones
        and daylight savings changes, paper sizes, et cetera.)
      * And, if they had set it, did they do it *before* or *after*
        messing around trying to set page sizes elsewhere.

The other localisation issue that routinely irritated me was having to
manually set language parameters in applications, such as spell
correctors in word processors, because they'd always default to US
English, despite my locale being *not* that.  Again, finding it'd often
need resetting with new documents.

I haven't seen these issues for a long time, thankfully.  But, my first
inclination is to say - make sure that you properly configure your
system before use (set your locale, timezones, languages, all that
"first run" stuff).  And if you didn't set such things *first*, try
creating a new user, setting its settings up properly, and see if that
helps when you try printing as that user.

Some of the first-run configurations are system settings (e.g. locale),
others per user (e.g. language), and need setting up during the login
process (select the user name, select your options, *then* type in the
password and hit enter to login).

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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