Jeremias- Thanks for this thorough explanation. Very helpful. And I wasn't really thinking "bug". I assumed that there was something in the various specs (like the margin issue you mentioned with PCL) that was playing games with me. And thanks for the heads up about the settings in Acrobat. You were correct. I'm guessing there's no way to disable scaling/auto rotate/center within the PDF itself via FOP. That's certainly not a necessity, just curious. Thanks again for all the work.
>>> Jeremias Maerki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 5/9/2008 3:27 AM >>> I guess that goes into my department again. ;-) Problem 1: Most likely you've fallen into the trap that you forgot to disable the "Page Scaling" setting in Acrobat Reader's print dialog. That has been the case in >95% of the cases similar problems were reported here. Problem 2: Another problem that I think occurs here is that in PCL I cannot print without margins. If I have text that is too close to the paper edge, it is indented. I have never found a way to print text all the way to the upper/left page edge in PCL 5. That's just a language limitation which is explicitely mentioned in the language spec. Especially with these labels where the text is very near to the paper edges such shifting effects are to be expected. Anyway, just to be sure I compared PDF and PCL output locally with your labels.fo. The only change I've applied to the file is that I switched to A4 because I don't have letter-sized paper. I sent the generated PCL to my Brother HL-1250 directly and printed the PDF via Acrobat Reader with all page scaling options (even page centering) off. If you don't do that you can't be sure that the margins are really those you specified in FO. My result: The two pages are nearly identical. What I could see is that the first table column is shifted to the right because of the problem 2 I noted above. If I just compare columns 2 and 3, the output has differences in the area of <0.3mm which I think can be tolerated. Also note in this context that PDF and PCL use different font metric sources (PDF: FOP's own font subsystem, PCL: the same as the Java2D-based renderers). You can see the effect yourself if you generate the intermediate format for both renderers: fop -fo labels.fo -at application/pdf labels.pdf.at.xml fop -fo labels.fo -at application/x-pcl labels.pcl.at.xml So this difference accounts for different line break decisions in more complex situations. You can work around that to a certain degree. See: http://markmail.org/message/n3myr6scq6afh7uz Just as an illustration how the two output formats differ, I've generated bitmap versions of the PDF and PCL with GhostScript and GhostPCL and created a comparison image using TortoiseSVN's bitmap differ. The result is attached. You'll see that the two output formats use slightly different fonts and that the first column is shifted to the right as mentioned above. You can also see from background-colors I applied to some table-cells that PCL cannot paint its cell background all the way to the right paper edge. But the rest is practically identical even though the intermediate files are slightly different due to font metric differences. Conclusion: Not a FOP bug. :-) On 08.05.2008 18:17:11 David Gerdt wrote: > I'm curious as to the differences between how distances are measured > between different output formats. I've been trying to get a sheet of > address labels to align correctly and am noticing a vast difference > between how they are rendered in a PDF vs how they appear in PCL. > > I use a combination of Eclipse and the Orangevolt XSLT plugin to > develop my style sheets and generate PDFs on a WinXP box because I can quickly > see the results. Ultimately, the documents will be rendered on an AIX > system, normally (though not always) as PCL. There are instances where > the same document can be rendered in either of these two formats, and > that's why these differences make me nervous. > > In the case of the mailing labels, I'm noticing about a 1mm difference > in height for the table cells. PDF cells are right at 26mm and PCL at > 27mm. That sounds like a very slight difference, but it adds up to a > 1cm difference over the ten rows of the sheet of labels. Also, the top > margin has a difference of about 5mm between the two formats, with the > first table row starting at 17mm in the PDF output and about 12mm for > the PCL version. > > Can anyone give any insight? Is this just a driver thing? > > I am running the 0.95beta on both machines. The fo is attached if > you're interested. > > Thanks for the help! Jeremias Maerki
