Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

1578.0. "Adjusting for different paper/print sizes" by JOCKEY::MARSHALLJ (Glad that the devil is red ......) Thu Oct 08 1992 11:46

    
    	*** Overcoming paper size incompatibilities ***
    
    Hi,
    
    A customer of mine is experiencing a problem which, off the top of my
    head I can't think of an adequate solution to.  As many other customers
    must have a similar scenario, I wondered if anyone out there could tell
    me if they know of a solution or whether its something to learn to live
    with.
    
    The problem is down to trans-atlantic mail/document exchange and the
    problems caused by diffrent paper sizes.  Customer has two major sites,
    site A in the UK and site B in the USA.  Users in Site A prepare all
    documents/mail using ALL-IN-1/WPS with printer tables adjusted to give
    66 lines per A4 page.  The vast majority of the mail is intra-site so
    this doesn't give a problem.  However senior managers on site A send
    lots of reports/financial info to counterparts in Site B.  They also
    use ALL-IN-1/WPS but obviously set up for a different paper size (A?)
    whixh is basically shorter and wider than A4.  Consequently when the
    print stuff received from Site A it is wrongly formatted (re. page
    length) and conversely when users in site A send to site B it is
    printed in wrong format (re. page width).  What they have asked me to
    look at is ways around this.
    
    I realise the easy answer (and sensible one) is to get the user to
    reformat it before printing.  However, given the seniority of these
    perticular end-users this isn't deemed acceptable.  some thoughts I've
    had;
    
    - Would Postscript offer a solution ?  If documents were converted to
    PS final form (using V3.0), as postscript is a pseudo-imaging
    technology, when a document is converted does it retain its page
    settings ie. the fact that its A4, or does it just know that lines 1-x
    are a page and when it is printed at the receiving end, these x lines
    will be `imaged' so as to fit the `page' size of the destination
    printer ?
    
    - Is it possible to determine the formatting information of a WPL file
    so that we could use this within a script to do pre-processing before a
    print operation to modify as required ?
    
    Both the above are very much long shots, but if anyone can suggest
    anything else I'd be most grateful.
    
    Regards,
    John

    I believe it's possible to do this by very slightly reducing the size
    of the PostScript printout. (If you know enough PostScript, the
    WPS-PLUS formatter uses a prologue file dev:[allin1.PRINT]WPSPLUS.PS
    which you could probably tinker with).
    
    D.

Hi,

Postscript is a page description language.  IE it describes exactly what text,
pictures, symbols, etc, appear exactly where and on what page.  It is very much
a final format; although possible, it is not sensible to try and use it as an
intermediate format which you can then process further.

What you can do, however, is as suggested in .1: you can put Postscript commands
in the prologue file to squash and stretch the documents (ie as though the paper
were made of rubber).  Sufficiently small changes are needed that the changes
in character height/width wouldn't notice.

To make a document formatted for A4 (297 * 210 mm) print on 'American' paper
(11 * 8.5 inches, 279.4 * 215.9 mm), use the Postscript commands:

215.9 210 div
279.4 297 div
scale

It's obvious which number comes from where, so you can change them to suit
other paper sizes; eg to make an 'American' document print on A4, it's:

210 215.9 div
297 279.4 div
scale


However, how about this for a far simpler solution:

When I create a document that I'm going to mail to someone, I don't put explicit page
breaks in it.  I leave that to the formatter at the recipient's end.  If I have
a chart or something that I don't want split over a page, I make sure it will
fit on a page, and put page breaks around it.  I don't think this is too much
for senior managers to do (if they aren't competent or caring enough to do it,
then they shouldn't be senior managers :-).

That solves the page length problem.  The page width between US and A4 is so
small that it could be solved by everyone using the slightly narrower margins;
the loss of two characters per line for the US people shouldn't upset anyone.

Alternatively, assuming that there is a reasonable margin on the left and right,
wider (ie US) documents could be made to fit on A4 by using a negative indent
(is this possible?), thus absorbing the extra characters by narrowing the
left and right margins.

I guess there are lots of solutions, depends how imaginitive you want to get

Scott