Can anyone help with the 'printable area' problem

[Graham Samuel]

On Mon, 02 Jun 2003 07:28:31 -0700  Richard Gaskin 
<ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
>
>Graham Samuel wrote:
>
>>  It seems from earlier posts that neither MC or RR offer a way for a
>>  scripter to find out what the actual printable area is on a page. It
>>  seems so crashingly obvious to me that this is absolutely needed for
>>  any but the most primitive printing facility in an application that I
>>  think it's time we got some kind of solution, at least for Macs and
>>  PCs. If anyone with sufficient technical skills would like to take on
>>  a solution for either or both of these platforms (Applescript, Xcfn,
>>  DLL etc - I am not competent to judge), contact me off list and we'll
>>  see if we can come to some arrangement.
>
>No need: see the printPaperSize global property
>
>For all other print-related properties, open the Transcript Dictionary and
>filter with "print".
>

No, Richard - I hesitate to suggest that you may have made a mistake 
(if you have, it's the first one - and I've been reading your posts 
for years), but in my environment, PrintPaperSize gives the size of 
the **page** (like US letter or A4) in pixels, but not the printable 
area within it. For example on my Epson inkjet printer, the maximum 
printable area on an A4 page is defined by margins 0.13, 0.13, 0.13 
and 0.57 inches. Without knowing this (and really why should my user 
be expected to look this up in a manual?), I won't be able to offer 
features like "use maximum area on page" and, to be safe I will have 
to set the margins of my printable area (the printMargins) larger 
than they need to be.

It's that information (which is certainly available to other apps - 
my favourite Mac example is GraphicConverter, but there are plenty of 
Window apps that use this info too) that I wish to be able to 
extract. In principle I might like to know other stuff, like whether 
my user has picked a colour printer or a black-and-white one, but 
right now I would be content with being able to detect this simple 
rectangle.

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