Page Setup: "Letter (Small)" vs. "Letter" as the default

John Davis noted that the Page Setup settings for his Brother HL-1270N laser printer defaulted to "Letter (Small)" rather than "Letter" as a paper size. He wanted to shift to having "Letter" be the global default but could not find a way to do it - until he used a text editor to open up the printer's PPD file (as stored in the Printer Descriptions folder). Here he found that "Letter" was listed as the default choice (*DefaultPageSize: Letter), even though this was not what was being listed in Page Setup as the default. So he tried an experiment: He deleted all lines from the PPD that referred to LetterSmall. He then selected Setup from the Chooser and used "Select PPD" to re-select this modified PPD. This eliminated "Letter (Small)" as a choice in Page Setup but did shift the default choice to the desired "Letter."

We noticed the same default "error" with our HP printer drivers, so we suspect this issue may apply to other brands of laser printer. However, a much simpler solution (as we have noted here as far back as 1996!) is to hold down the Option key when closing the Page Setup box (by clicking OK). A dialog box will appear that asks if you want to save the current settings as default settings. Click to Save.

Update: You might also want to try Printer Defaults 1.5.8.