Printing landscape in Evolution

Page setup in Evolution

Many people are annoyed by the fact that when you click to print something in many programs, Evolution – the very popular email client from Novell for example, the Page Setup tab in the Print dialogue where you would normally select the orientation is greyed out, leaving you unable to change it.

The solution is simple; you just need to go to File->Page Setup and you may now change the orientation. Going back to Print you’ll now see the greyed out orientation option as “Landscape” instead of “Portrait”.

If I remember correctly this was selected as a “100 Papercut” bugs which should be fixed in Ubuntu for the upcoming 10.04 Lucid Lynx release (if it doesn’t I’ll be sure to submit it). Other programs, like gedit, have already solved this and you can change the settings before printing. Let’s hope the Ubuntu devlopers manage to fix this for Evolution and other Linux software that don’t yet benefit from something as obvious as making it simple to change page orientation when printing, because Google Chrome for example doesn’t have a Print Setup menu, thus making it impossible to change it like you can in Evolution.