I have struggled for a long time with the correct papersize. CUPS printer settings is set to default value A4, and /etc/papersize also is ‘a4’. However, when printing in Evince, the papersize is set to letter. Of course, I could change this manually, but why on earth was this option set as my default setting already?

Then I came over a question regarding the same issue in launchpad.net. Is says that applications tend to get their settings from your local settings – the language settings – more specific the LC_paper. Below is the star-comment from launchpad, posted by Pascal De Vuyst:

This is because evince uses the value of the LC_PAPER locale setting, for en_US.UTF-8 this defaults to letter. You can override this setting by using an LC_PAPER environment variable, if you want to do the change system wide you can add LC_PAPER=”en_GB.UTF-8″ (defaults to A4) to /etc/environment and log out and back into GNOME.

Now – of course you’ll need the the selected language in your locale settings – you may need to run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

and add “en_GB.UTF-8” and any other language you would like support for.