It's Forty Two!

Firefox is a great web browser, but it is also insanely frustrating to work with sometimes. For instance will the Page Setup default to US Letter, possibly the two most annoying words you can come across in the world of printers and printing. How many times haven’t you seen some office printer stuck on “Please insert Letter” holding the entire print-queue back? Why the fuck the Americans can’t adapt to international standards however is another rant altogether.

Anyway, the issue in Firefox is that when you try to print a webpage to file, at least under Ubuntu (haven’t tested it elsewhere), the Page Setup tab is greyed out. You actually have to go to the Page Setup menu option to change this. The Page Setup menu option has no shortcut, so if you’re unlucky enough to have a window that is menu-less like in my internet bank when looking at a receipt after paying a bill, you’re basically screwed. There is no way you can change the paper format. Changing it in the main window doesn’t affect the other one, nor does it care about default settings when the print dialogue is called from JavaScript or Ctrl-P.

The solution to this is to change the default printing option in the config because you can’t change it under preferences either. Type about:config into the address bar, and change the setting named print.postscript.paper_size from “letter” to “a4″. That fixes this annoying issue once and for all. Of course this should be detected from the OS regional options, but as user friendly as Firefox is, it isn’t that user friendly.