Hacker News Reader

Comment by rswail | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the rest of the world is not aware of US sizes.

Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.

View on HN

I never realized that “LETTER” in that error referred to paper size—no printer I’ve had has actually given that error, so I only ever heard about it through oblique references to Office Space and such. It makes so much more sense now…

The 'PC' part is paper cassette, it's the printer literally telling you to load letter sized paper into the paper cassette, but everyone acts like it's some mysterious message that's impossible to figure out.

Well, PC also means Personal Computer, and letter also means element of alphabet, so it's not like there isn't room for confusion

Sounds impossible if you didn't read the manual. Who reads manuals?

On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

>On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

Only if there is an issue with the rollers or something and it can't feed the paper from the paper cassette. No one ever wants to read the manuals or do basic troubleshooting though. Hell newer ones have a menu on them that will walk you through each of the troubleshooting steps, but people would rather put a post-it on it saying it's broken.

I was joking :)

Could be PC LOAD LEGAL if your document is really weird.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com