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From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Problems with transcript (help)...
Message-ID: <310@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 23-Oct-87 05:42:59 EST
Article-I.D.: sequent.310
Posted: Fri Oct 23 05:42:59 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Oct-87 01:10:54 EST
References: <207@ur-tut.UUCP> <441@ecrcvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: CS Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK.
Lines: 74
Summary: laserwriter clipping is part of your problem

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In article <441@ecrcvax.UUCP> johng@ecrcvax.UUCP (John Gregor) writes:
>The first problem is that, being in Europe, we use A4 size paper and
>the transcript programs apparently clip to 8.5 x 11.  I first
>encountered this in enscript -r.  This resulted in the bottom line
>being almost completely clipped and also the first character from each
>line was almost entirely gone.

Not quite - part of your trouble comes from the LaserWriter
itself. There are two lots of clipping going on in the printer:

1) Hardware clipping.

Based on the notches in the size of the paper tray, the printer
hardware chooses an area outside of which the laser is
inhibited, in order to avoid printing off the edge of the piece
of paper.

2) Software clipping.

The page type you use (A4, letter, legal etc) controls the
amount of memory that the interpreter uses for its framebuffer.
This is inescapable low-level clipping: drawing outside of the
framebuffer has no effect. This is just software and has not
interaction at all with the hardware clipping.

The TranScript stuff usually does no extra clipping at all, so
you are losing black marks on the paper because of one of the
above. You may be surprised to hear that I have NEVER yet met a
LaserWriter or LaserWriter+ where the default software clipping
region is entirely within the hardware clipping region. In
other words, the bitmap the PostScript prepares is being
clipped by the printer electronics.

To find out what is happening on your printer, try the
following:

%!
initclip clippath       % find the edge of the framebuffer
gsave
  0.75 setgray fill     % fill it in gray
grestore
72 setlinewidth         % lines 1 inch wide
stroke                  % draw a black border
showpage

If you do this, you will get a large gray rectangle with edges
about 0.5 inches wide: the 1 inch think line is centred on the
boundary of the framebuffer, so the outer 1/2 inch is removed by
the software clipping. However, you will probably also find
that one edge is not quite wide enough BECAUSE IT HAS BEEN
CLIPPED BY THE HARDWARE. This is the edge where the bottom line
of your enscript output has got lost.

To fix it, you will need to adjust the margins stored in the
EEPROM - look in the manual for details of the "setmargins"
command, but it will be something like

%!

0 serverdict begin exitserver
statusdict begin
0 -2 8 mul setmargins      % set new top & left margins

------------
As for the other problems, we have AT&Ts version of DWB running
with TranScript 2.0 on a VAX 11/750 under BSD 4.2 + NFS 3.0, so
I guess you could mail me with a more detailed list of your
woes.

-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-980 4811 ext 3900