Re: [tlug] Stand Up for OpenOffice!!

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Godwin Stewart writes:

 > On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:08:21 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull"
 > <stephen@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > LC_PAPER.  Try the man page for `locale' to find out what values it
 > > takes (I don't think they are the traditional
 > > "language_REGION.encoding@example.com" format).
 > 
 > They are, actually.
 > 
 > `LC_PAPER=en_GB` will result in A4 being the default.

Yeah, I know that's acceptable, but there ought to be a more
transparent spelling of "A4" than "en_GB" (and "fr_FR" ain't it!)
Let's see....

Argh.  Actually, who knows what they are?  POSIX leaves the semantics
of locale names to the implementation.  One *could* define a locale
named "A4".

And this really is an abuse of the locale mechanism, come to think of
it.  Locales really specify a family of paper sizes, not any single
paper size.  I mean, suppose you wanted to specify B5 or B4 as the
default, and there are no locales with that default?  I guess that's
why LC_PAPER was removed from ISO/IEC 14652. :-)

In browsing about, I noticed that there are several other environment
variables to specify paper size that are respected by one or more
programs (didn't think to record them, though ... drat).