page size - chromium printing

Most federal and state tax instructions have, over the past 3 years, been transformed from PDF's into (unhelpful) web pages.

This means that citizen taxpayers must now themselves save instruction webpages to PDF. Once saved to PDF, citizens may again accomplish quick searches, print worksheets, or preserve the PDF as a record of the instructions they used that year.

Sounds quick, but not always: how the webpage is saved to PDF determines how it can be printed, and computer settings determine how the browser may save webpages. All together then, three additional failure possibilities have been added to tax preparation. Perhaps the idea is to encourage citizens to purchase parasitic 3rd party tax preparation.

chromium solution

Let's solve this browser PDF issue if we can, starting with Chromium. Chromium saves/converts webpages to PDF's in a default A4 paper size. But most US printers can only print to letter-size. Chromium, as installed, provides no method for changing the paper size of how a PDF is saved.

With a significant time investment, I was able to determine that Chromium relies upon the locale variable LC_PAPER for its PDF paper size setting. Now, locale variables are complicated multi-effect variables which one doesn't wish to risk modifying for a simple paper setting. I was unable to find any other way to proceed.

1a. in-session

The hack below has an immediate effect in Chromium, allowing one to select the type of paper on a drop-down, whereas there was previously no option to change paper.

# localectl set-locale LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8

1b. in-session

If the above doesn't work, it may be important to know that Chromium takes its settings from GTK2, variable GtkPaperSize, of which we would like to at least be able to change between letter and A4.

2. persistent configuration

In Arch, I found two files, depending on whether I wanted global settings or user settings. Both must be created and there's a skeleton in /etc/skel/.config/locale.conf

• user: ~/.config/locale.conf, which can be activated by logging out and then back in. However. whether or not Chromium bothers with user-level settings seems questionable.
• global: /etc/locale.conf.

good information on the subject.

• disable the LC_ALL and/or LC_CTYPE variables as they will override all subsequent individual variables such as paper size. But where? Arch prefers us to use locale-gen, which means uncommenting inside /etc/locale.gen. However, locale-gen sets monolithically: all variabless get the same value.

change what?

en_US

locale

Just as with the pernicious problem of pulseaudio, locale information is stored in several places and they need to be narrowed down to a single source. Further,they're exported to kernel as a group but we only want LC_PAPER to be corrected, otherwise we will have problems with fonts. Typically, they are held consistent across all variables.

/etc/locale /etc/profile.d/locale.sh
~/.config/locale.conf
/etc/environment (PAM only)
/

localectl

locale-gen

A worthless application. Causes problems familiar to the similarly abstracted GRUB configuration, once it began auto-generating. Locale-gen generates monolithic LC settings, not individual ones. No setting just one variable. Using # locale-gen after a user modifies /etc/locale.gen, it overwrites all the LC variables to one single language, so it's worthless attempting to just change paper size

Of particular note is users will be punished with A4 if they don't want to declare a locale, since declaring locales causes problems with various fonts..