How to change default page size to Letter rather than A4?

[stevecjor]

I wanted to ask & answer this here for the benefit of others. The reverse question was answered at How do I change default paper settings from "letter" to "A4"? - #17 by JohnCyrmu, and the answer for this is very similar.

If your paper size is A4 and your locale setting in LibreOffice is “Default - English (USA)” then choosing “English USA” (no “Default -”) will fix it, which is to say that it will make the paper size default to Letter, not A4.

To make the change, go to Tools → Options… → Language Settings → Languages, and then choose the value from the Formats → “Locale setting” dropdown.

[erAck]

You didn’t say what operating system you use, but if Linux:

The proper way to set the paper size on Linux systems is to tell your system or user environment, not have workarounds in LibreOffice. The paper size is used that the command paperconf gives in the environment LibreOffice was started in.
man paperconf
man papersize
Summary:
File /etc/papersize Contains the name of the system-wide default paper size to be used if the PAPERSIZE and PAPERCONF variables are not set.
Environment variable PAPERCONF Full path to a file containing the paper size to use.
Environment variable PAPERSIZE Paper size to use regardless of what the papersize file contains.
Environment variable LC_PAPER Locale’s paper size to use if none of the above, not even /etc/papersize, is set.

[k9gardner1]

I’m surprised that this would need to be done, however, as during initial setup of my environment (happen to be on a Raspberry Pi here but have experienced this on other Linux implementations), I went through the localization settings as far as country and location and other formats like time and date settings. I don’t know why page size would not be considered part of that. Letter size seems to be unique to the US, and you can’t even buy A4 paper here, so it is a bit of a hassle to always have to figure out how and where to adjust this.

[erAck]

I’m rather surprised that if you initially setup a system as en_US.UTF-8 (where LC_PAPER should inherit the letter paper size from the locale) there’s still something that writes something different (a4) to /etc/papersize (or overrides with PAPERCONF or PAPERSIZE). That’s a broken system setup.

[jeffmcneill1]

Locale setting changes don’t reflect in LibreOffice, if it is just a paper issue, then use echo 'a4' | sudo tee /etc/papersize

[Wanderer]

@jeffmcneill1

then use echo …

But note the condition already mentioned above:

@erAck

used if the PAPERSIZE and PAPERCONF variables are not set.

.
On your other topic:

@jeffmcneill1

Locale setting changes don’t reflect in LibreOffice,

There are a lot of other influences like my own settings in (default) templates and even stuff like “load from printer settings” wich can influence this.
.
As this is a thread with older origin: There may even be installs with old default templates, before LO switched to accept empty files. I remember english language defaults on german installation, when creating “new Writer file” from Windows explorer.