Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!eagle!icdoc!qmc-cs!liam From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: full page printing Message-ID: <455@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk> Date: 29 Apr 88 19:34:50 GMT References: <2929@saturn.ucsc.edu> <313@laura.UUCP> Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts) Organization: Computer Science Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK. Lines: 51 Summary: hard and soft clipping regions Expires: Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: Keywords: The limited printing area on the LaserWriter has always annoyed me. Try the following "beefed-up" code to display your available page area: clippath gsave 0.8 setgray fill grestore 14.4 setlinewidth 0 setgray stroke showpage The 14.4 line is 0.2 inches, but the path is the boundary of the clipping region, so the outer 0.1 inches get clipped off by the PostScript interpreter. Using commands like "letter" and so on will change the default clipping path and so have an effect on the rectangle that gets printed. However, if you expect to see your LaserWriter print a grey rectangle with a 0.1 inch black border around it - think again! What you will get is a grey rectangle with a 0.1 inch black border round most of it, but there will be at least one edge where the black border is thinner or even completely missing. Why? The answer is that the printer *hardware* performs clipping as well, so PostScript is preparing a bitmap that the printer won't even bother to try to print. By putting sticky tape over the notches in the side of the paper tray you can trick the hardware into believing it has a different sized piece of paper, so it will change the clipping area appropriately (incidentally, PostScript uses those notches as well when deciding the default clipping path). How can you get the software clipping region inside the hardware clipping region, so that you at least get all of the bits that PostScript has so lovingly prepared? That is the function of the "setmargins" primitive: note also that the version 3.0 PostScript interpreter has fixed a bug/feature so that changing the margins doesn't change the meaning of (0,0) any more. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE - can someone tell me how to tweak the horizontal & vertical position of the hardware clipping? I refuse to believe that they aren't adjusted by some variable resistor somewhere, but everytime I give the above lecture to an engineer/Apple techie/salesman I get blank looks and absolutely no information whatsoever. -- William Roberts ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (gw: cs.ucl.edu) Queen Mary College UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP LONDON, UK Tel: 01-975 5250