On Friday 30 May 2008, Brian Barker wrote: >At 09:35 29/05/2008 -0400, you wrote: >>Yes, as I was selecting which printer to send it to. Its one of the >>options in that window. > >OpenOffice sees the printer settings and the page format as two >distinct things. > >>And I found it set to landscape. Duh... > >No "Duh" about it: if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't have >found it ... > And obviously I didn't..
>>Its 73 years old & still counting. :) > >You are still a youngster, then? Diabetic, so my chances of CHS are about 7x higher than average, but I passed a stress test on the treadmill, a couple of shots they carried around in little lead boxes, and about an hour in 2 sessions under a 'gamma camera' & was pronounced all ok about 3 weeks ago. All that prompted by a half an hour of very slow pulse (for me) down in the mid-40's accompanied by some chest pain. My activity runs in spurts, with physical work mixed with too many hours in this chair. As for 'growing up', I refuse to. And my reputation for tardiness has extended itself such that one comment a few years ago said I would probably be late for my own funeral. I hope so. :-) >>This is not what I would call an intuitive place to put that option. > >Intuition, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder! I'm not into >defending OpenOffice here - like you, I'm just a user, of course - >but I have to say that once I got used to it, it does seem a more >sensible place to put this. It sure 'caught me out' :) >>Located in that pulldown, I would have expected that to effect the >>formatting I see on screen, and it did not. > >Oh, it certainly does for me! Are you perhaps looking at Web Layout >instead of Print Layout (in the View menu)? Let me check, but I don't think so. No, its in print layout. Selecting the web layout screws it up with the cover page photo on top of the page 2 index content. Don't forget, this was an imported .doc file. >>I wasted about 60 sheets of paper and toner testing various settings >>in the print dialog with no effect on the printed output, ... > >Incidentally, although OpenOffice has an integrated export to PDF >function, Which in this case seemed to work well. >I've installed a (freeware) PDF converter as a virtual >printer on my system (CutePDF Writer, in fact). I can test any >printing questions like this using the normal print dialogues but by >printing to the virtual printer and examining the resulting PDF files >- all without even switching on my printer. Absolutely no use or >wastage of paper or toner ... In this case, while the cover page & a couple of pix in it were colored, that had little to do with the text content, so I sent it to a B&W lase printer I had just bought as all the old printers I had that worked with the CoCo's pure text output, had either lost their character generator (in the case of a Radio Shack dmp-120 I had finally found a fresh ribbon for) or their film ribbns used on the daisy wheels were so old & brittle they broke on the first character strike, both my 15" wide brother, and an 18" wide Xerox 1650ro suffered from that, so the serial cable out of the coco, is now feeding an FDTI ser<>USB adaptor plugged into a 16 foot USB extension cable coming up here and seen as /dev/ttyUSB1, and a daemon I & Jon LaBadie wrote that captures this to a file after doing the usual cr to lf conversions, and when the second read timeout occurs, the daemon figures that file is finished, and then feeds it to lp -Plp3 $FileName, which is one of those $100 brother laser's on the end of another 16 foot USB extension cable, sitting on top of the backshell of the desk the coco and all its accessories live in, in the basement. It also is the fastest printer here by far, the old workhorse C-82 sitting beside my monitor here does great color, but that great color is at 3 pages/hour delivery rate, and even cheap color output is about 90 secs a page when using the 360 dpi profile. So the laser is done printing the odd pages while the epson is still on page 2, of 28 pages. >>That method of course cost me the ability to use page offsets to >>make room for the ring binder punches, but the margins were large >>enough to clear in any event. > >You can do all this - including offsetting in opposite directions for >right and left pages - in the page formatting in Writer, of course. Yes, one of the reasons I wanted to use writer to print this particular file. >>But it does bring up the question: Why does the print dialog offer >>that portrait/landscape selection if it has no effect? Sorry, I said that w/o actually checking, now I am as I type this. There are effects, and not what one would expect, so read on, McDuff. >It does have an effect. My only guess is - as above - that you may >be looking at Web Layout by mistake. No I wasn't. In fact, in that format->page dialog window, it apparently defaults to landscape, and when you select portrait, its little wysiwyg window in the upper right, actually changes to a landscape view, exactly the opposite effect. And if I then close that window with portrait selected, my onscreen view actually changes to landscape! And the page count goes from 56 to 62 because its using the next of the shorter pages to complete what did fit on a single page in portrait view. And I just printed the first page while in that mode to this printer since the other hasn't been turned on, and it is indeed portrait on the paper, while showing it in landscape on the screen. Houston, we have a problem. :) And for that reason, I'm sending this reply to the list also. This is something that really should be fixed. Or as another Grand Old lady of my long acquaintance would say, just one of the bugs in this 10 day old carcass. Joanne Dow, the lady known variously as the Wizardess back in her BIX days or SWMBO more recently does have a way with words. >By the way, one useful effect of having separate settings for >orientation for the page and the printer is in what Writer calls >brochure printing. You can set your document pages to be portrait >and half the actual paper area but then set your printer to think >landscape and actual paper size. If you then tell Writer to print a >brochure, it will distribute the pages so that you can fold a stack >of sheets in half and produce a multi-page brochure. Clever, eh? I'd say so. >Brian Barker Thank you Brian. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) To err is human, to forgive unusual. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
