Getting the correct default paper size in LibreOffice Writer

For years OpenOffice/LibreOffice has ticked me off by endeavoring to give me documents that after I walk down the hall to the printer, are asking for A4 sized paper, though I live in the US where we use "Letter" sized paper.

Even though I set the defaults for LibreOffice, and even though the printer and any printer settings are ALL set to Letter.

Well, I found this documentation of what is a really stupid way to have to make this change actually happen. Create a template, and set it as "default" and I guess this works.

From: https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Changing_the_Default_Template

1. Create a document and the content and formatting styles that you want.
2. Choose File - Templates - Save.
3. In the New Template box, type a name for the new template.
4. In the Categories list, select "My Templates", and then click OK.
5. Choose File - Templates - Organize.
6. In the Templates list, double-click the "My Templates" folder.
7. Right-click the template that you created, and choose Set as Default Template.
8. Click Close.

Now if I can only get Impress to stop setting my default language as Finnish...

Convert PS to PDF, A4 vs Letter

In the US here we use some paper size called "letter" and apparently elsewhere they use A4, and for some reason is very close, but not quite the same. Probably some sort of metric thing. Anyway, I got a PostScript file that was created for A4 size output and wanted to convert it to a PDF. Regular ol' ps2pdf would truncate parts of the border, same with printing to a pdf. So, even though its not in "my" man page for ps2pdf, there is an option for telling ps2pdf the type of paper to expect.

$ ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 toconvert.ps converted.pdf

Edit:
I did a bit more messing around: this page at linuxjournal.com has a lot of additional information on these types of conversions. In Arch, the package you need to get psselect is "psutils". I ended up having to experiment a bit to get what I needed. I wanted to remove the first 3 pages which were cover pages.

The command below did what I needed, order of arguments is important.

$ psselect -p3-25 toconvert.ps | ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - converted.pdf

The first command select pages 3-25 of the input PS file, pipes that to ps2pdf which then uses a dash "-" in place of the input file name.