Odd page size default

[Toby Blake]

> OK, that will default to Letter size (en, en_US, en_CA, and fr_CA
> are Letter, anything else is A4).

Ah, OK - thanks.

> It can come from many places; for the GUIs on OSX, Apple has their
> own stuff for saving printing preferences, and probably is overriding
> the PPD setting automatically.  Also, I believe that Apple's PDF
> filters always set the page size based on the PDF file, which would
> affect printing from both GUIs and the command-line.

Yes, it's sometimes quite confusing trying to work out what bits the 
apple s/w has its fingers in.

> For the command-line programs, we use "lpoptions" and command-line
> options to override the defaults; use "lpoptions -p printer" to see
> the options for a particular printer.

Yes, I tried this, but it didn't seem to work - I set lptoption -p 
printer media=A4 but the CUPS settings (as seen via the web interface) 
were still set to Letter.

>> (Basically I want to distribute ppd files for all our printers to our 
>> Mac users, with a script to set up the printers for them - but first I 
>> want to make sure that all is working correctly).
> 
> Is there a reason you aren't using printer sharing for this instead?

Yes, our printing infrastructure is 4 print servers running Linux and 
LPRng with our own filtering system, serving approximately 60 printers, 
so the Macs have to fit in with this.  We haven't really considered 
using CUPS on the print servers as we use Kerberos auth.

Cheers
Toby