Letter vs. Letter (Small) settings: a follow-up

As pointed out by several readers, TIL article #20731 explains: "Prior to the creation of US Letter Small and A4 Small, the printable area for US Letter and A4 was in fact the same as for US Letter Small and A4 Small. Some customers, however, selected US Letter or A4 in conjunction with an option "Larger Print Area" that gave them larger margins, and this size is now the same size as the present "US Letter" or "A4" sizes. Selecting US Letter or A4 requires more printer memory for an area of margin that is rarely used when printing standard business documents. This causes slower print times as well as prevents some complex documents from printing if the printer runs out of memory. Therefore, the default is (and has always been) the smaller margin area." Thus, by this logic, "Letter (Small)" is the intended default, and is not exactly an "error."

As noted by Matt Deatherage, having "Letter (Small)" as the default is especially convenient for users with older documents (created prior to "Small") that would otherwise "reflow" when printed - if the larger Letter size was used as the default.

Shon Hall notes that the Option key technique to save a new default did not work if he switched printers. When he returned to the first printer, the default setting was again "Letter (Small)" rather than "Letter." Deleting the "Letter (Small)" entries in the PPD (as suggested) did work. Neal Pearlmutter adds that you may need to create a new Desktop Printer and/or delete the "parsed" version of the PPD file currently in use (stored in "System Folder:Preferences:Printing Prefs:Parsed PPD Folder") in order for the change to the PPD file to take effect.