Re: Landscape Legal

[Brian Murray <Brian.C.Murray@VANDERBILT.EDU>]

It's been about a year, but we had a similar problem.

We had tried to use the "declare-layout" as you did, but with the same
result: legal output on letter paper.  The root cause of our problem was
that the PCL being generated by SQR was not very good.  Apparently the
sequence of printer setup PCL was such that the printer's paper size was
getting reset by a later setup command.  Don't quote me but I think the
problem was that the legal-size command "<esc>&l3A" was followed by a
command to set the margins and the margin command appeared to cause the
printer to reset the paper size.

Anyway, our solution was to send a PCL sequence direct to the printer.  We
left our printer and layout declarations unchanged as SQR needs these to get
the rest of the report right.  Then in the BEGIN-REPORT procedure we added
the following code:

  encode '<27>&l3A' into $LEGALSIZE          ! that's ampersand-ell-three-A
  print-direct $LEGALSIZE

    N.B. that is a lowercase letter ell, it won't work with anything else.

Everything worked fine from that point.  If your printer supports auto-tray
selection it should pull from the tray designated to hold letter paper.

I know this all sounds kludgy, but I spent about 5 hours modifying an SQR
and hand editing PCL to finally get this to work.  We also had to specify
the top margin as that appeared to also reset to the printer default.  The
PCL command for top margin is "<27>&l#E"  where # is number of lines.


BTW, the general form for the paper size PCL command is
   <27>&l3#A     ! that's ampersand-ell-number-A

   where typical values for # are
      2 = letter
      3 = legal
      6 = 11x17
    12 = B5
    13 = A5
    26 = A4

Good luck.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Clark" <PGCLARK@VAC-ACC.GC.CA>
To: <SQR-USERS@list.iex.net>
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2000 11:21 AM
Subject: Landscape Legal


> SQR 4.3.4
>
> Hhhaaalllppp.........
>
> I am trying to create a report on landscape legal.
>
> My declares are as follows:
>
> declare-printer DEFAULT-HP
>   point-size=7.2
>   symbol-set=0U
>   pitch=17
>   font=3
> end-declare
>
> declare-layout default
>   paper-size=(14in, 8.5in)
>   orientation=LANDSCAPE
>   max-columns=234
>   max-lines=58
>   left-margin=0
>   top-margin=0.125
>   line-height=9.5
>   char-width=4.32
> end-declare
>
> When output goes direct to printer, it is printed on landscape letter with
the right portion of the report "chopped off".
>
> When output goes to the Viewer, it appears just fine on the screen, but if
you try to print from the viewer, you get the same result as above ...
unless you first manually change the printer properties in the print
dialogue box. This is not an acceptable option for our user community (hell,
even going to the viewer first is considered an unviable option by them)
>
> What am I missing????
>
> I have searched high and low in the archives. There are some suggestions
on how to print landscape legal in Lineprinter mode using the init-string
but I can find nothing for HP.
>
> I can't believe that I am the first geek trying to print landscape legal
to a HPLaserjet. Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks much,
> Peter
>