printwiz - print more lines on a page

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004, Reggie Freedman wrote:

>
> I am forced to retire a Panasonic laser 4450 (similar to HP's old Series II
> laser) that has two paper trays, an invoice form in the top tray and plain
> paper in the bottom tray. I've been printing on an invoice form in the top
> tray, 76 lines, the first 24 or so are 6 lpi and the rest at 8 lpi and a
> matching salesperson's worksheet with costs, item sources, etc., on plain
> paper from the bottom tray. The Panasonic has worked well for many years. Now,
> supplies and drums are much more expensive than two new inkjet printers.
> Forget about repairing it.
>
> I don't seem to be able to configure printwiz to put more than 65 lines on one
> piece of letter size paper. I've changed a lot of things, lines per page,
> length of page, etc., but no difference to the output I can see. Line 65 or so
> is about where it should be, about two inches up from the bottom of the page
> leaving lots of room for the remaining text lines. My form (created in AutoCAD
> and saved as a gif with blue coloring so it looks the same as the old
> preprinted blue ink form) prints just fine and the invoice text from filePro
> prints nicely on top of it . . .  Except after about line 65, the rest of the
> invoice text, the important stuff, the subtotal and shipping charges and
> TOTAL, etc., to line 76, is on next piece of paper. Seems simple . . . I'm
> missing the 'simple part'. Anyone?

Before I tell you what I hope is the answer, let me tell you how you might
discover the answer for yourself. Run Print Wizard with its /debug
parameter. It will spit out some information as it goes along, telling you
about its analysis, measurements, and decisions.

In this case, I believe it will tell you something like "No formfeeds in
text. Assuming 66 lines per page."

Print Wizard tries, at its core, to auto-fit data to the page. It counts
maximum characters per line, and figures out horizontal pitch. Then it
counts maximum lines per page, and figures out linespacing. But it has
problems if there are no formfeeds (character hex-0C). It has to do
something. In early releases, it simply assumed 66 lines per page (LPP).
In later releases, it does pattern analysis to do a best-guess
determination of LPP. Sometimes it guess wrong, especially in situations
where there are many GOTO tags, or you are otherwise telling it to jump
around on the page.

The simplest solution is to set the LENGTH parameter, which is the lines
per page value. You can set this very high if you like. Then, you would
have to force a page feed by including a formfeed character, or by somehow
advancing over the bottom margin of the page.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
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