Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« Media consumptionMainIE/Mac »

A4

611 words

A4 may not be the most æsthetically pleasing paper size but it is quite mathematically pleasing and more significantly it is the only paper size in Europe. Thus, it seemed always particularly odd that Apple seems to set the default paper size depending on your preferred language in OSX, as the language people choose surely doesn't imply anything for the paper they use. In particular, many English speaking people don't use Letter sized paper.

Thus far the problem is annoying but easy to analyse and sort out. Let me offer a more subtle problem with this scheme: If your preferred language isn't English, you'll bump into programs which haven't been localised to your preferred language every now and again and they will be in English. Or, with programs that still don't use the neat OSX localisation techniques, you simply may have downloaded the English version by accident, due to Versiontracker's complete ignorance of languages other than English. I obtained an English version of Acrobat Reader this way. I never really gave much thought to it as Adobe's localisations tend to be quite insulting anyway.

One thing, however, kept bugging me. Sometimes, when printing lengthy papers on our departmental printer, and using a carefully devised scheme of waiting a few extra minutes and going to the loo before picking up the printed paper at the printer room, I was disappointed to find that the printer hadn't done any printing and displayed something along the lines of No correct paper, use A4 in tray 2 instead?, requiring me to confirm that before printing everything happily while I cursed the printer for its stupidity.

It turned out it wasn't the printer's fault but the Mac's (you saw that coming, didn't you?). Because Acrobat is in English, the system seemed to have chosen Letter as its default paper size and Acrobat sent the print job for Letter paper. Luckily the problem is as easy to resolve as it is obscure: In the Print Center, choose the Preferences... item from the menu and explicitly select the size you really want. You'll have to do this even though the popup menu already displays A4 as the size of your choice. Only selecting it once more will create the com.apple.print.defaultpapersize.plist preference file which seems to overrride the default setting irrespective of language.

Without that file, English applications seem to use the English default. That is, the default setting depends on the language of the current application rather than the preferred language you chose. A similar effect as that seen in Services menus, by the way – perhaps a more general quirkiness in OSX?

Looking at that, I asked myself why I didn't see that problem earlier? To begin with, I didn't know or expect the Print Center application to have a Preferences... menu item. I just thought of it as a Chooser plus castrated desktop printing. Secondly, I had already set the paper size to A4 when I had played around with the CUPS web pages on the system. Thirdly, I thought the standard way to set a default paper size would be in the Page Setup dialogue, perhaps doing something obscure like holding the command key when pressing OK.

I.e., none of the things I expected either traditionally (command key) or technically (CUPS) worked. Which leads me to ask: Why isn't all the printing stuff part of the System Preferences Being able to set the default paper size and add printers there would feel much more natural and only leave the status reporting to Print Center. At which stage I'd obviously have to suggest replacing Print Center by a revived Desktop Printing feature.

June 16, 2003, 0:50

Add your comment

« Media consumptionMainIE/Mac »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking