force paper size

[Malte Schmidt-Tychsen]

Hello everyone,

I have an HP Laserjet 4+ set up as a network printer connected to my file/print/... server in my home network. Several people with connections to this network use this printer.
I use the Gimp printer driver for HP Laserjet 4 series

Unfortunately due to a very long standing bug in Openoffice.org it gets the US Letter paper format send to.

Since I live in Germany and don't have access to US Letter I use A4, which is the normal paper size over here.

As soon as Cups tries to print with US Letter format the printer stops printing and requests to be fed with US Letter paper in order to print on it. I have to manually log into Cups over the web interface, stop the printer, go to the printer, switch it off and back on and then restart the printer via the web interface. Another option would be to switch off the printer and reboot the server.

The options described above are only available to the admin. So if a user unfortunately sends a US Letter format document to the printer the printer is unavailable to anybody until I come along to reset it.

Since I only have access to A4 paper size I would like to know if there is an option to force Cups to only send A4 format size documents to the printer and convert from US Letter if necessary. I know about lp0.ppd and set all the defaults to A4 already. But this doesn't change aything.

I realize even if the bug in Openoffice gets fixed I still have a problem if any other app decides it wants to print in US Letter.

Any ideas? Please feel free to email me at maltest@(remove this and the brackets)web.de for further questions or if You have an idea I should try out.

Thank You