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I had a lot of trouble with paper sizes in LibreOffice always going back to US Letter, but I found paperconf command-line utility to be of great help:.

Check out the man page forpaperconf

Read the default Paper size

paperconf

This returns the contents of the papersize file

Set the default paper size

sudo paperconfig -p a4

This creates or overwrites the /etc/papersize file

Example Usage

You normally want the paper set at A4 size, but take the case where you are working a project with index cards, and you want A6 to be the default for the time being:

sudo paperconfig -p a6

When done, and you want to go back to A4 your usual A4 default

sudo paperconfig -p a4

    johano I had a lot of trouble with paper sizes in LibreOffice always going back to US Letter

    I'm just curious ... what are the chances that most of the world's population that own computers, and use LibreOffice on them want US letter size? The developers of LibreOffice might know where the majority of their users live, and decided on a default based on that knowledge.

    Seems to me that even Solus defaults to US English as a language and as a keyboard spec, even though there are many others available. (Is the installer smart enough to default those based on the user location?) And even this forum is conducted in English.

    Surely it's not because there are more people in the US than there are in the rest of the world.

      WetGeek, I'm guessing most countries that use the metric system likely use the A sizes for paper. There seems to be no way in LibreOffice to set the paper size away from the default US Letter that will stick, I don't know why ¯_(ツ)_/¯

      paperconf seems to be system-wide and respected by LibreOffice as well as other applications.