Setting printer defaults to A4 instead of Letter

[NewbieHK]

I managed to get it changed from Letter to A4. 

I have a HP Laserjet M1522. It is being 'managed' by HP Universal Printing if that helps - when I installed or updated at some point, this HP Universal Printing PCL 6 (v5.2) took over. The 'Universal Printing' hasn't made any difference as far as I can tell, but, well, I did manage to change Letter to A4.

I went into Devices and Printers and then to the HP Univeral Printing icon (the icon for the HP Laserjet M1522 sits beside it but I did not try this icon. I right click on the Universal Printing icon, went to Printer Properties and then to Device Settings. In here I changed the default paper from Letter to A4 in several places and it worked.

I did try other things first (Printer Preferences, etc) but those didn't stick.

Control Panel > Devices and Printers > HP Universal Printing,

- Choose Device Settings

- Change all the paper settings from Letter to A4. 

I'm using Windows 7 but others in our small office are using Windows XP and it has now worked for them too.

Hope this helps. 

[Taymoor]

I bought hp laserjet M1132 Multifunction printer two days back but I'm unable to set its letter size paper as a default to A4 size I've done everything I could have, but the setting is not being changed. All the methods you all people suggested I tried too. Kindly help me or else I'm now totally frustrated with this problem that I'm planning to sell my printer out and get the one from other brand. Thank you!

[sablewolf1]

If you run the HP solutions center (or use Start, Devices & Printers, right click on the Icon, select "printing preferences")

select Printer settings /Features / Paper Sizes/ More (select the "Metric" option) / and change it to A4 210x297mm

Then OK

This doesn't change the factory default per se but allows you to create and save your own shortcuts with A4 as the default

[ehsannik]

My problem is in scanning to A4 size. I have a Laserjet MFP1132 and every time I wanna scan an A4 page I must go to "Scan To" in program menu and change the scan setting from Letter size to A4 size and then scan the page. but when I click "OK" in this setting box, A4 doesn't stick to the scanner settings and the next time I wanna scan, the default scan size is Letter!!! I'm totally confused and enraged of this matter!!! plz help me

[verbose]

(Reposting this from a similar thread)

Hi everyone,

I think I can shed some light on this issue after running into it today. It's really embarassing that such a glaring design flaw has not been fixed in all these years.

I am using Windows 8.1 with US English as the UI language, but am located in Germany and have set locale, location, number formats, measurement system, keyboard layout etc. all to German (Germany). The only thing that is US English is the display language. Still I am stuck with Letter as the paper format in all presets, when it should be A4. Nothing I can do on the UI can convince the printer driver to change the predefined presets from Letter to A4; the change to A4 only sticks until I click another preset. Nor is it possible to change the presets in any other way, e.g. to make duplex printing the default, which is also stupid.

After some research, I have modified hpcm4506.CFG from the driver source (both manually and using HP's driver preconfiguration tool) and reinstalled the driver, but that did not seem to have the intended effect.

Then I found the location where the presets are stored in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Printers\HP {Printer Name}\HPPresetRoot\PresetPoolData]

There, it is at least possible to get rid of unwanted built-in presets by deleting them (as Frank Thompson asked) - however, you need to keep at least one, which is apparently needed as the basis for user-defined presets, which are stored as deltas only.

The contents of the presets pointed me to hpcm4506.xml in the System32\spool\drivers\... folder (plus a copy in the driver store). This file contains the following gem (for each preset):

              <!-- Locale Specific paper size defaults =============== -->
              <!-- US - 1, Portugal - 351, Japan - 81  -->
              <switch>
                <name>LocaleID</name>
                <case>
                  <name>1</name>
                  <select_option>Letter</select_option>
                </case>
                <case>
                  <name>351</name>
                  <select_option>Letter</select_option>
                </case>
                <case>
                  <name>81</name>
                  <select_option>Letter</select_option>
                </case>
                <case_default>
                  <select_option>A4</select_option>
                </case_default>
              </switch>

The main mistake is of course to have a default that is persistently reapplied. Windows does this right - you can set you locale to German, which sets the right defaults (e.g. metric units for measurement) - but if you then want to use US units for measurement, you can override the associated default. Not being able to modify the built-in defaults is rarely a good idea. If you do not allow that, you should be rather sure to get it right. Guessing based on the language ID is not the way to do that. Unfortunately, there is no setting for the Windows default paper size, but if you want to base your guess on anything, the location or the selected measurement system are much better indicators than the language.

Back to the xml, by replacing the above with

              <switch>
                <name>LocaleID</name>
                <case_default>
                  <select_option>A4</select_option>
                </case_default>
              </switch>

everywhere, I was able to change all presets to A4 - expect the 'Factory Defaults', which insist on always reverting to Letter for some reason. So I ended up deleting that preset (PresetPool:0) from the registry and now have a, hopefully permanently, letter-free setup. But boy, was this stupid.

- verbose

[edanto]

That is some great detective work verbose.

I'm surprised that there were no replies to this thread by other people with the same problem.  You mentioned that your post was originally in a similar thread; could you give a link to it?  I'd like to see if that thread is busier, and maybe if HP have released a better fix for it.

I've just installed the latest version of the UPD and it seems to have the same behaviour; paper size has defaulted in properties and prefernces to Letter.  It's the very start of my research to find out if this is going to be a problem and if so what we might have to do to work around it.

[Frankl02]

I am the OP.

I gave up on this when the printer at issue failed (a small plastic piece; not user-repairable) and I decided to replace it with a different brand. (I was so annoyed by the complete failure of HP te deal with this issue properly.)

In the meantime I did end up purchasing another HP printer (for reasons which now escape me).  And this at least maintained my A4 defaults on Win 7 Pro.

I wish anyone who still needs to pursue issues on this every success.

[verbose]

edanto, there are no other replies on the other threads:

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-Printing-Questions/Changing-default-printing-shortcuts/m-p/481302...

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printing-Issues-Troubleshooting/Default-Paper-size/m-p/4813004#M121328

These are my only posts here, so you can also find them via my profile page.