I have an Epson Stylus NX430 connected via USB to a 64-bit Fedora 17 machine. I set the printer settings just fine in system-config-printer CUPS application, but when printing from several applications (i.e., eVince document viewer or Firefox) the printer default settings are incorrect. Within these applications the default appears to be set to photo paper and quality. Even after changing the print settings, from within the applications, the default changes back to photo settings when repeating a print job.

Can anyone explain to me what else I can look at to permanently change the default print settings other than system-config-printer?

Some applications, including Firefox and Evince, simply don't care about the system default print settings. They maintain their own configuration files that remember the last settings that you used in that specific application. It's not a Linux problem or a distribution problem. It's just the way those programmers wrote their applications.

I came across this blog post that describes a way to change this in Firefox. The article refers to Windows but I guess there's a reasonable likelihood that it would work in Linux as well. You can access the settings he mentions by typing about:config in the Firefox address bar.

Caution: I haven't tried this and it might mess up your Firefox, but I suppose you could just reinstall it if necessary.

This is the link: http://saalwaechter-notes.blogspot.c...t-printer.html

I haven't seen anything similar for Evince. Evince saves its configuration in ~/.config/evince/print-settings (at least that's where it is in my Xubuntu), but I believe that file is rewritten each time you run (or close) Evince so editing it probably won't accomplish anything.