Kari Mattsson writes:
Maybe you should choose the smaller paper size?
Neither is. A4 is 18mm longer, but Letter is 6mm wider:-( A4 210 * 297 mm US Letter 216 * 279 mm Canadian P4 215 * 280 mm I was hoping that the fact the US way had not won meant Letter caused problems for A4 printers but not vice versa, but apparently not.
I've had some success by creating hybrid paper size of A4 width (210 mm), and Letter height (some inches). That is, take the smaller values of both. That way the printers (atleast some) seem to be happier. Most new printers seem to be able to scale between A4 and Letter.
Looking around, I found even an RFC which recommends that. RFC 2346 ("Making Postscript and PDF International"): Use A4 with 33mm top/bottom margins, or Letter with 21(?)mm left, 26mm right margin. (His advise is not quite consistent.) So it looks like the sizes are the only problem, not paper size names or whatever in addition.
'make A4' and 'make letter' would be another variant (or some extra Makefile lines).
Howard Chu writes:
And yes, we use Letter size in the US. I wonder if we could key off "AC_LANG=en_US" or somesuch...
Nope. Locale names are not standardized, and I'm in any case writing this on host with LANG=en_US (but LC_CTYPE=no_NO). Our site's setup is something like this: linux rs6000) LANG=en_US LC_CTYPE=no_NO sgi) LANG=en_US LC_CTYPE=en_US ds vax) LANG=ENG_GB.8859 hp*) LANG=C.iso88591 solaris sun*) LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1 alpha) LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 *Good* native language support is nice, in particular to someone who doesn't understand English well. But it's not an improvement when a standard utility outputs 8-bit Norwegian to a program which expects 7-bit ASCII, or with poor translations (which are common), or Norwegian and English text intertwined because the translation is outdated. Presumably the situation is better for languages spoken by more people.