Missing page sizes in Page Setup

[JC at OZ]

I am helping a friend try to get his LaserJet 6MP workign with OS X 10.2.2. It previously worked fine with OS 9, but in OS X many paper/page sizes that were previously available are missing.

I've learnt about .PPD files and can see that in his case the relevant LaserJet 6 MP PPD file has got all the old paper sizes listed in there, so how can I make them appear in the Page Setup dialog box?

I have tried changing the "Format For" setting to "Any Printer" instead of "LaserJet 6M" and that gave me some additional page sizes but not the complete list.

Thanks for any insights!

[Geminis]

If you update the system to 10.2.4 It should be back again, as on apple.com;

Printing Enhancements

The Paper Size pop-up menu in the Page Setup dialog now has submenus if the selected printer has several margin settings for a paper size.
Includes software for Brother printers that work with Rendezvous.
Addresses a potential security issues with the CUPS printing software; for more information see technical document 61798 "Apple Security Updates."
The Shared Printers list now appears by default in the "Format for:" pop-up menu in Page Setup dialog boxes.

Be warned, I don't know how you installed the printer, but there are some cases you'll have to install them again! (cups etc.)

[JC at OZ]

Problem is solved, so I will post the solution here for the benefit of the readers. I went onsite after having found that my friend had already upgraded to 10.2.4 and still had the problem.

We got into Print Center and tried to add a second printer pointing to the same physical print device, but that did not seem possible unlike other OSes I work with. So we had only one printer with the minimal list of paper sizes.

I then used Print Center to Add the printer back in again but rather than select the Generic printer type I selected Other and then browsed to the .PPD files that I knew existed in /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj. I doubleclicked on the LaserJet 6MP.PPD file, which seemed to accept the contents of the file but did not appear to change the characteristics of the printer in any way, and then exited out of Print Center.

We already had two applications up, Appleworks and Filemaker, and selecting Page Setup showed no change to the printer list of page sizes. But by stopping and restarting those applications the full list of page sizes that I knew was in the .PPD file appeared.

So effectively the Generic LaserJet 6MP settings used by OS X did not actually refer to the .PPD file contained in the folder mentioned above! And we had to rebuild the printer configuration forcibly by pointing it at that .PPD file and then restarting applications to use those new settings.

Hope this is of use to someone. thanks to Geminis for taking the trouble to respond.