After advice from Piet Plomp, I adjusted some locales-related settings on our PCs. In /etc/papersize I set the system wide default paper size:

      a4
    

And in /etc/default/locale I set the Locale defaults:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_CTYPE=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=nl_NL.UTF-8
LC_TIME=nl_NL.UTF-8
    

The default language is set in /etc/environment:

<snip>
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
    

. OpenOffice needs extra nudging in /etc/openoffice/psprint.conf:

As a result of this, when installing perl packages, the system starts complaining about the Locales settings not being supported. This can be repaired by installing the appropriate language packs.

	Note
	CUPS is still installing its printers with letter as the default. This issue is on my ToDo list.