Evince chooses default paper size the wrong way

Thank you for your suggestion. However, the changes you are requesting aren't really a bug and require more discussion, which should be done on an appropriate mailing list or forum. http://www.ubuntu.com/support/community/mailinglists might be a good start for determining which mailing list to use.

Well I don't know what you consider a bug, it just seems to me that paper size is a printer specific and not country specific setting. At the office where I work the printer would stall every time it got a job with the wrong paper type.

For the non-savvy linux user messing around in .profile is a no go and for people traveling between countries it's even worse. If not a bug then at least it should be on the "wish list".

I agree with thorseth. This is a usability bug and is known upstream regarding this thread http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349102.

Confirming.

It's not even a printer specific setting, it's a print job specific setting. There might be a default per printer, but I would like to change it for a print job when I feed paper manually to print on envelopes or index cards for example.

Could I ask that this be moved up in priority? Every time I open an A4 sized document in evince and try and print it, it sends it as letter, which freezes our printer until someone notices and hits the reset button. I want my locale to be en_US as I want American English for most things, but I am in Japan. Ubuntu has /etc/papersize, and I think evince should respect it.

I agree, but in the meantime you can try the suggestion form Pascal De Vuyst in this thread: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+question/6846
it does the trick, but it is clumsy and irritating.

I consider the evince behaviour as a pesky bug. I would like to print per default on an A4 printer using American English set as default language. I do usually work in a NIS and BSD automounter network and do not want to mess up my environment with the workaround proposed. The setup must be local to the machine and not to the user.

Having lost good few hours searching where this setting could be, I am +1 to resolve this.

Minor, but ... somewhat important note. If you grep /etc/ for 'a4|letter', you will find /etc/papersize. No way you can guess that LANG="en_US.UTF-8" has anything with that....

At the very least (or until it is patched), my suggestion: in the default config, put on the top of the /etc/papersize the note like:

# Note that some applications use LANG/LC_PAPER settings instead of this configuration.
# To complete the paper size configuration, set in your /etc/environment (or .bashrc)
# LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" for letter
# LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8" for A4

the bug has been fixed upstream now

This bug was fixed in the package evince - 2.25.4-0ubuntu1

---------------
evince (2.25.4-0ubuntu1) jaunty; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    New Features and UI Improvements:
    - Show progress information when loading/saving remote files
      (lp: #273611)
    - Remember page setup options (lp: #224882)
    - Show a confirmation dialog when there are pending print jobs
      while closing the main window (lp: #139907)
    - Show progress information when printing (lp: #178437)
    - Add document URI to properties page
    Bug fixes:
    - Bump glib requirement to fix build with older versions
    - Fix mime type handling
    - Fix saving images to remote locations
    - Do not try to jump to the location of the find result for every match, but
      only for the first one. It makes searching really faster.
    - Fix zip mime-type in comics backend
    - Fix several memory leaks
  * debian/control.in:
    - updated build requirement

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:56:51 +0100

Hello, I have 2.28.1-0ubuntu1.2 and still experience the same. I've tried the proposed solutions, by adding a4 to /etc/papersize and the LC_PAPER=a4 or LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8", but the paper size still says US Letter in evince.

Well, gnome bug 349102 gave me the solution, to set up first the page size from "Page setup". Now it seems that evince remembers the paper size.