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From: greid@adobe.com (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Larger print area
Message-ID: <828@adobe.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 89 18:23:40 GMT
References: <1263@majestix.ida.liu.se>
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Reply-To: greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid)
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Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
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In article <1263@majestix.ida.liu.se> andwi@majestix.ida.liu.se (Andreas Wickberg) writes:
>The Apple print-manager gives the user an opportunity to increase the
>printable area on the page. In Sweden the standard LaserWriter IINT
>has about 1 cm margins that can be reduced to a few mm's with this
>option on. I've tried to see in the Laser Prep how they do this, but
>found it too stuffed away. The question: is there any 'clean' way of
>doing this? Is the Apple function very device dependent (eg, will it
>work on a VT600)? And what do they do?

Unless things have changed in the printer since I last looked, the way
they do this is by NOT calling the "note" operator, which itself
REDUCES the size of the frame buffer.  "note" gives you wider margins
on the assumption that you'd rather use the memory for standard VM
instead of frame buffer, if you weren't planning to write close to the
edges of the paper anyway.  If you save, say, one inch on each edge of
an 8-1/2 x 11 inch page, you save approximately 416 kbytes of memory.
Not a trivial amount.

The Apple LaserWriter executes "note" for each job by default, since
programs like MacWrite can't get close to the edges of the paper
anyway.  The option in the print dialog causes it NOT to execute
"note".  There is no other action taken explicitly, to the best of my
understanding.

Whether or not this feature has any effect on other printers should, I
believe, depend on whether or not that printer has the "note" operator
built in.  It is not a standard part of the language, but sort of a
paper size.

To see if this is really true, you would need to print something that
did not go through the Apple LaserWriter driver.  Write a PostScript
program like this:

	clippath .5 setgray fill

And send it to the printer across the serial port, or with a program
like SendPS which bypasses the Printing Manager.  You should see the
"larger print area", since it is actually the default from the
printer's point of view.

Glenn Reid
Adobe Systems