Setting up pages


Page Setup - HP 1055 (and maybe more)

 

A question posed by Bill Gore:

How do you change the direction for the output of a drawing for example if you us the arch D parameter in powercadd the drawing comes out of are printer with the 24" side first not the 36" side and what I want is the 36" side coming out first. I have tried making a custom page setup and it cuts my sheet off and leaves about a 12" margin at the top but it does come out the direction I want . We are using a 1055cm using the postscript driver.

  

 

Phil's answer:

Page Setup controls the orientation of your Page onscreen only -- it does NOT control the orientation on the printer.
To rotate the print relative to the roll of paper in the 1055CM, you must check the "rotate" box in the Printer Features pane of the PRINT dialogue.

It is important to understand that there are two places where a page's orientation can be changed:
a. To avoid (bigtime) confusion, ALL Pages, (including all Custom Sheets) regardless of size should be defined as having a vertical orientation. For example, an E-size Page would be defined as 48" height x 36" width. If you wish to define a 12 x 36 Page, you would enter 36" height x 12" width.

b. To the 1055CM, when the "rotate" control is OFF (unchecked) it prints with the HEIGHT of a Page parallel to the LENGTH of the roll of paper. Conversely, when the "rotate" control is ON (checked) it prints with the HEIGHT of a Page ACROSS the width of the roll of paper.

Once you have sorted this out, you can save various presets that serve as reminders.
We use four saved settings in our print dialogue for the 1055:
Best Quality-NO ROTATE
Best Quality-ROTATE
Normal-NO ROTATE
Normal-ROTATE

Again, it is the Print Dialogue that controls page orientation on the roll of paper--not the Page Setup.

Phil L o h e e d on March 08, 2004

  

 

David's answer:

We had this EXACT same issue and solved it by installing the 1055CM driver from the HP web site. At the same time I also installed the LaserJet driver for OS X. The one I installed was gotten to by selecting the LJ8000 during the driver lookup on their web site but it appears to be for all LJs from the 5 series onward.

One or both of these added support for the type of rotation you're trying to do. The support for this was in the resource fork of the PPDs for OS 9 but these can't be used in OS X so HP had to redo things. But for whatever reason, these added things are a part of the OS X distribution.

All of the above was done in OS X 10.3.2
--
To add to my other post, you setup custom page sizes where what the system calls portrait, is actually specified as wider than tall. Do this plus the updates I mentioned above and no front panel fiddling needed.

AND if you set your margins correctly you can have 2 pages custom pages defined that give the same results on 24" or 36" paper. Handy if you run out of 36" and are in a hurry.

After you install the HP software, this process will allow you to have 24" x 36" prints come out using 36" paper without dealing with the rotate settings.
I downloaded and installed the DesignJet and LaserJet drivers at the same time. So I'm not sure which enabled what functions.

As to the LJ8000, this office has 4 different models of LaserJets and after downloading the one for the 8000, it listed all in this office as being supported by this particular driver. I'm guessing they have a single driver for all Postscript LJs for OS X.

Both the LaserJets and the 1055CM are postscript, jet direct devices with very similar characteristics in terms of printing options.

David Ross on March 09, 2004