Leap 15
KDE
KDE applications (Okular, Kate …) always print Letter-sized documents as A4, causing printer errors and fails.
All page size settings are set to “Letter” in all places.
Other applications (Libre Office, Firefox …) print correctly.
Was not a problem in Leap 42.3
System settings>Regional settings>Formats allows you to specify KDE defaults which are what all KDE applications will use.
These were all set correctly at setup and - besides - contain no adjustments for printer page size.
Just to try and get a better handle on this, can you please share the output of the following?
locale
and perhaps
egrep -i "defaultpaper|defaultpage" /etc/cups/ppd/*
Did /etc/papersize finally get dropped in 15.0? I still have it in 42.3. Maybe having one containing letter would be of use? My primary DE on openSUSE has always been KDE* or TDE.
Yes, I think it is deprecated. Largely ignored by most applications for years, and CUPS doesn’t require libpaper support anyway. The locale LC_PAPER variable is what is relevant AFAIU.
Just to note that the default paper size set in CUPS for a given printer (and configured in it’s respective PPD) does determine what the KDE print dialogue will show by default.
Difficult to test here in Europe – where a lot of KDE developers are located:
We need some North American folks with US Letter paper loaded in their printers to test this …
locale
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
sudo egrep -i "defaultpaper|defaultpage" /etc/cups/ppd/*
/etc/cups/ppd/Canon_MF4370.ppd:*DefaultPageSize: Letter
/etc/cups/ppd/Canon_MF4370.ppd:*DefaultPageRegion: Letter
/etc/cups/ppd/Canon_MF4370.ppd:*DefaultPaperDimension: Letter
/etc/cups/ppd/Canon_MF4370.ppd.O:*DefaultPageSize: Letter
/etc/cups/ppd/Canon_MF4370.ppd.O:*DefaultPageRegion: Letter
/etc/cups/ppd/Canon_MF4370.ppd.O:*DefaultPaperDimension: Letter
I’m the OP. I can tell you that attempting to print a PDF from Okular or even a TXT from Kate with “Letter” page size onto Letter paper in the printer results in my printer (Canon MF4370) printing one distorted page with print spilling off the edge then throwing an error (on the printer LCD) asking for A4 paper to be loaded.
Printing an ODT from Libre Office or a webpage from Firefox works OK.
Thanks for clarifying your page sizes before. That is a problem, (and I’m surprised suitable scaling isn’t applied before printing). FWIW, I note others have also reported this regression. For example…
Solutions? I print every day, so this is a giant PITA. Was not a problem in 42.3. Should I erase-and-reinstall 42.3 or is this going to be fixed in 15?
Update: If I change the page margins to 10mm on all sides (Print … Properties … Page), the problem does not occur.
Unfortunately, I have not yet discovered a way for Okular to remember the settings. It always returns to the 5mm L/R & 6mm T/B defaults.
And, digging through the Ubuntu Bug Report, there’s this Qt Bug Report which was submitted 5 days ago: <Loading....
[HR][/HR]An explanation:The KDE folks use a Qt interface which relieves them of a lot of the low level programming effort but, unfortunately, it means that KDE applications rely heavily on the Qt code being able to support hardware configurations properly.
That references Qt version 4.8.7…we’re using 5.9.5 by default (for Leap 15.0). There have been a few similar bug reports describing this behaviour (over a span of several years), impacting KDE since version 4.X. I’m disappointed to still be experiencing the same lack of persistence today. IIRC, there have been suggestions that each KDE application should be responsible for it’s own print settings (history).
Can someone explain to me how, in the 21st Century, that supposedly the “… most usable Linux distribution and stabilized operating system …” can release with BASIC PRINTING NOT WORKING??
Printers in most case depend on proprietary software. Ask why the manufactures still ship faulty drivers for Linux :’(
This is not a printer driver issue, it’s about printing behaviour with KDE applications.
Please understand that this isn’t a distribution-specific issue, but really needs to be resolved upstream with the KDE devs. It would be interesting to note if TW KDE users are similarly impacted.
Sounds like a fine time to switch to Gnome …