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From: bobr@zeus.tek.COM
Newsgroups: comp.laser-printers
Subject: Re: Printing legal size pages on Apple LaserWriter
Message-ID: <8709211553.AA11978@brillig.umd.edu>
Date: Tue, 8-Sep-87 16:59:39 EDT
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Posted: Tue Sep  8 16:59:39 1987
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Ralph P. Sobek writes:

    Normally, both the LaserWriter and LaserWriter+ get their page size
    information from the codes on the paper feed trays.  As such, if you send
    legal size (14") text documents and you have the legal paper tray, it
    will work properly.  Unfortunately, packages, such as Transcript, *only*
    understand letter size pages.  It suffices to intercept the PostScript
    document before it goes to the printer and specify \legal, \letter,
    \note, \a4 , etc. in order to define the page to be of the correct size.
    For example, TeX allows one to create legal sized documents.  Then the
    "\legal" option *has* to be specified to dvi2ps in order that it comes
    out propely on the printer.

This is correct in-so-far as it goes.  It's true that the LaserWriter(+) does
have interlocks to match the page size declaration to the loaded paper size.
LW has predefined macros for letter, legal, plus several European page sizes.
But my previous note regarded an apparent problem with the LW which is
circumvented in a rather frustrating way by these default macros.  

As I said before, having decoded the letter and legal macros defined within
the LW, it appears that there is a limit to the amount of memory allowed for
scan conversion, and that limit is less than a full legal size sheet.  If, by
whatever means, you invoke the \legal macro within the LW, the page length
mask gets set to something like 13.5 inches, but the width gets trimmed to
the 5 or 6 inch range.  For my purposes, I wanted to render 8 x 13.5 inch
pages, and using the \legal specification would truncate the sides of my
output.  My experiments were done by arming the single sheet feeder, so paper
cartridge identifications should not have been an issue.

Because of these problems and because of the foreseen problem of getting out
legal pages in a printer queue which is otherwise exclusively letter size, I
chose the method I previously described of outputing two sets of the
document onto letter sized pages, one appropriately transformed, and then
cutting and pasting to get legal size.