DefaultPaperID

When I first came to the Mac there were a handful of things that I didn't initially get -- Honestly speaking in some cases I still don't get them (and/or think the PC way is perhaps better)

One of those is the font dialog (cmd-t) -- I find it so frustrating to work with and what are all of those little funky controls at the top?

But I digress -- this post is about printing. My first experience on Mac was 10.3 and the printing seemed a little funky, pages never quite came out as I was expecting without a lot of twiddling. 10.4 seemed to really improve it and in 10.5 it's been (almost) flawless.

Over christmas I was doing christmas card and made a custom paper size to print them out with -- So far, So Good. The problem is ever since then my default paper always ends up being the custom size. No amount of going to preferences, saving, restarting, etc. seemed to force it to stick -- It subbornly reverted to my 'christmas card' size.

Finally tonight I dug in and did some digging -- Turns out there is a preference com.apple.print.PrintingPrefs.plist -- One of the items in there is 'DefaultPaperID' which pointed at, you guessed it, my christmas card size.

Deleting that one plist entry fixed the problem -- Now I happily print to the proper size by default -- It does beg the question what happened -- How did it get changed and why wouldn't it change back but at least I'm back up and working again.