Can anyone help with the 'printable area' problem

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Mon Jun 2 15:14:02 EDT 2003


Graham Samuel wrote:

> 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.

Gotcha.  No, it's not in the engine, and hence not in the manual.  If memory
serves, Scott Raney had something to say about this one not long ago -- I
can't recall the details, but I think he characterized it as non-trivial (as
much as I agree it would be useful, esp. if the printMargins were set to the
same values on startup).

Scott -- what's the word?

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
 ___________________________________________________________
 Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com
 Tel: 323-225-3717                       AIM: FourthWorldInc




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