Confusing UI in Print Mode

I was always confused in Print Mode when I wanted to print to PDF that the page setup section showed a greyed out select field for the page size, and often with a page size displayed that isn’t the same as specified in the layout options. I just learned from a search here that printing to a graphic doesn’t require the selection of a page size as it will be taken from the settings in the layout options, but this isn’t obvious at all, and is rather confusing people when a different size is shown that you can’t change.

The thing is that I have specified A4 in layout options but somehow US Letter is specified in the page setup section in Print Mode (in both, printer and graphic targets). And if I change the page size in the printer target area it is also changed for the graphic target which made me always do this without understanding why this is necessary. And I still don’t understand why the (wrong) page size is shown in the graphic target, especially if it doesn’t matter anyway, since the page size is taken from the layout options?

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The sizes listed under Page Setup in Print mode are lifted from your printer driver. For graphics and PDFs the size that is respected is the one shown in Layout Options. This is in order that (for example) you can work with scores at A3 size and email PDFs at A3 size off to a professional print-shop, even if your own printer doesn’t handle sizes that large.

The developers have made the choice to darken that list and make it unselectable when “Graphics” is chosen at the top of the panel, which I find pretty clear, though it could be argued that when Graphics is selected the Page Setup dropdown shouldn’t appear at all.

Just a follow-up on this: I changed the page size and orientation for the score in the layout options from A3 horizontal to A4 vertical, went into print mode where – expectedly – A3 was still shown when I had “Graphics” selected (without being able to change that). Despite this being confusing already, the orientation can be changed in the print settings, and, in fact, has to be changed manually (despite having been specified in the layout options already), because otherwise it will print in the wrong orientation (but with the correct paper size). This should really be fixed in a future update.

The page orientation buttons in Print mode refer to the orientation of the sheet of paper, not the orientation of a page of music. If you want 2up, spreads or booklet layout then you probably want the orientation of each page of music to be portrait but the orientation of the paper has to be landscape. This is why the two orientations must be set separately.