[ sending this particular one back to the list because it contains something useful for everyone and nothing private ]
Hi Jan, Jan Stary wrote on Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 12:46:00PM +0200: > I produced a PS output with "man -Tps rm > rm.ps", > with output paper set to a3, a4, and a5 in man.conf. > This results, respectively, in > > %%DocumentMedia: Default 841 1190 0 () () > %%DocumentMedia: Default 595 841 0 () () > %%DocumentMedia: Default 419 595 0 () () > > which apparently are the right dimensions. However, > the Minolta will print all of them on A4 paper, > although it does have a stash of A3 and A5 too. > > That's where I thought it might take a hint from the DSC comment, > if I changed the "Default" to "A3" or "A4" or "A5", or if mandoc(1) > itself put that in the DSC comments. I rewrote it manually before > each printing, but the Minolta still prints them all on an A4: That's interesting, but anecdotal. It is neither surprising that a specific printer selects paper as configured (in whichever way), as opposed to inspecting fikes it is sent; nor would it be surprising if other printers, or even the same one, or printer drivers on the print server, could be configured to inspect the contents of PostScript files to select paper. The trouble is, i just don't know what firmwares and softwares do, what they should do according to standards, and where to look for standards in this respect. Does anybody else know? > Hm, so I can remove man.conf altogether, > because even the default "letter" manpages > will get printed on A4, which is what I want. That's a bad idea. The purpose of the -Opaper= option is not to select paper, but to adjust the width and height that the document content will require, and the primary purpose of the DocumentMedia DSC instruction isn't selecting paper either. but to inform how the content was arranged. If you use -Opaper=letter, margins will be reasonable for letter size paper, but ugly for A4: Since letter paper is wider than A4 but not as tall, printing on A4 without -Opaper=a4 will usually result in an awkwardly narrow right margin and in wasted space at the bottom. Yours, Ingo
