Hack your PPD so You don’t have to Scroll for 10 Minutes to Select the Correct Paper Size

Written by James McDonald

July 19, 2012

I use 2 papersizes to print under Fedora 17 A4 and 4×6 Photo.. I don’t know about you but I find the following annoying:

 

The Default PPD has a long list of different paper sizes which you have to scroll through in order to select the correct Paper Size.

Even when you set the default using system-config-printer to your common default you are still up for a scroll every time you need to use your other commonly used paper.

So here is what I did:

As root stop the printing subsystem CUPS

service cups stop

Make a copy of your ppd and a backup

cp /etc/cups/ppd/HP-Officejet-Pro-8500-a910.ppd ~/cups/
cp /etc/cups/ppd/HP-Officejet-Pro-8500-a910.ppd ~/cups/HP-Officejet-Pro-8500-a910.ppd.orig

Edit your ppd to include only the papersizes you use.

gedit ~/cups/HP-Officejet-Pro-8500-a910.ppd

I removed all references to other papersizes from the:

*UIConstraints
*PageSize
*PageRegion
*ImageableArea
and *PaperDimension

Sections.

Copy the new PPD back to it’s system location

cp ~/cups/HP-Officejet-Pro-8500-a910.ppd /etc/cups/ppd

Start the CUPS service

service cups start

Here is what you end up with when viewed from Gnome Image Viewers Print Dialog.

 

This is what my PPD file looked like after I removed the long list of never used page sizes.

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