page setup - A4

[livfoss at blueyonder.co.uk]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 20:11:25 +0100 Carsten Levin <carstenlist at itinfo.dk> wrote:

[...]
> And Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com answered:
> Query the printPaperSize global property.
Thanks, but my problem is that when I use the "Page Setup" menu to 
choose A4 everything prints perfect and the settings are 595,841 ... 
untill I quit Revolution. Next time Revolution is restarted the 
settings are set back to 612,792.
Therefore I would very much like to know how we can script the 
PageSetup to stick to A4.


Hi Carsten, I'm having trouble getting a good interaction with a printer as well. A 'dirty' solution to your problem is to script 

  set the printPaperSize to 595,841

in the startUp handler of your application (or a preOpenStack handler for your main stack). This will work if you know that all your users will really be using an A4 printer, so that the physical paper size and the size assumed by your program will be the same. 

Of course it won't work if your user has suddenly changed the default size to A6 card or something, and it will continue to look wrong when the 'Page Setup' dialog comes up with 'US Letter' appearing as the default. To my mind the real problem is that AFAIK in Revo you can't write back the properties of the printer driver in general - if you could, then you could arrange that when the 'Page Setup' dialog comes up, the size is shown as A4. This seems to me a symptom of the fact (as far as I've been able to understand it) that Revolution doesn't provide a way to talk to printer drivers, although it is clear that this is possible for applications in both Macintosh (e.g. Graphic Converter, which even knows the actual printable area, or PageMaker, which memorises even obscure printer settings to do with colour management etc) and Windows (where expert friends tell me that Visual Basic provides a way to interrogate and set printer properties really easily - can anyone else elaborate on this?). I don't know if the Revolution team are planning to improve the printer interface or not, or whether maybe they already have - I haven't tried version 2.0 (beta) yet, but I will soon. Anyway it seems to me to be a key area for any development system, and of course it would be far better if printer control could be accomplished within the Revolution environment rather than by developing platform-specific external functions. Just me two (Euro) cents.

Anyway I hope this helps a bit

Graham

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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France