Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!usc!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!samalone
From: samalone@athena.mit.edu (Stuart A. Malone)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Curious problem with Imagewriter
Summary: try offsetting the paper and the program
Message-ID: <13757@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 23 Aug 89 16:14:16 GMT
References: <1630@eds.ericsson.se> <227700012@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> <58212@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: samalone@athena.mit.edu (Stuart A. Malone)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 28

In article <58212@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> william kerr gibson <gibson@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:

>...Now when you print mailing labels you cant be bothered with page breaks so
>you have to select "No gaps between pages" in the style dialog box. Now, my
>print code is the same, but for some reason when I print with that option the
>imagewriter decides to print a blank page before printing the first page. I
>must have spent 12 hours pouring over the code and trying different things
>before I decided to see if other programs have the same problem. When I fired
>up MacWrite 5.0, it did the same thing but when I printed from MacWrite II
>there was not a problem at all...

My understanding is that the ImageWriter print driver wastes the page in order
to avoid backing up the paper.  Choosing "No gaps between pages" gives a larger
printing area, but if you try to actually use the extra area at the top of the
first page, the ImageWriter goes forward to the next page rather than try to
back up to the beginning of the first one.  Perhaps MacWrite II didn't waste a
page simply because when you tested it you didn't put anything in that extra
space at the top of the first page, so there was no need to waste a page.

If I've got this right, you might be able to fake out the ImageWriter driver by
figuring out how much space you have to leave at the top of the first page to
avoid the wasted page, and offsetting your entire document by that amount.  Of
course, the user of this program would then have to offset the paper by this
amount to compensate.  But assuming that the paper doesn't jam when it hits the
paper bail, this should allow you to print on the entire first page.

				--Stuart A. Malone
				samalone@athena.mit.edu