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Producing Labels - Page Size

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 9:54 am
by coldrick
I have tried to use the Labels Wizard and come up with the following problems...

1. Even though my default printer is set to A4, the page produced by the form wizard is 198x288. (A4 is 210x297).

2. There seems to be nowhere to change the page size once the forms/labels have been created.

---- We can work around this by changing the label size and margins so that we effectively don't use the right 10mm of our labels, but is there a reason for the incorrect page size?

Also, it seems as though the "Label Wizard Tutorial" has been created for an earlier version of Capital as there are many obscure references such as

Step 8. "Click OK" which should now be "Click Save"

Step 19. Setting "Join" to either "Joined" or "Not Joined", however at this point of the exercise "Join" refers to a dropdown list and can only be set as Body 16 to Body 30.

Step 23. "Click OK" should now be "Click Save"

Step 28. This is an obscure jump back to the "All rules must be true" box, when the previous step was referencing the "Reporting Finished" box. Could have been made a lot clearer. At the end of rule 29 there is an afterthought in parenthesis telling the user that they should be in the "All these rules must be true section", but that should have been made clear as an additional step prior to step 28.

Steps 31 and 32. refer to "Click OK" but should be "click Save".

Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 12:08 am
by COBS Tech Support
The page size is determined by the physical characteristics of your printer, and this varies from printer to printer. Not all printers can print at the very top or bottom edges of the page, for example. So 'printer A4' is not the same thing as the actual size of a standard A4 page.

Another thing to note is that we've observed that many printer drivers have very basic bugs in them. If you set the page size to a different set of dimensions, i.e., letter size, sometimes the driver will still return the physical dimensions of the page instead of the smaller (and expected) page size.

Posted: Sat May 24, 2008 3:48 pm
by coldrick
Our printers have no problem printing on our labels which have a very small margin on them.

Wouldn't it be better to have your forms wizard set up the page size to a proper A4 size and fill in the margin settings with whatever it thinks the printer is capable of? At least then we could reset the page margins if the form wizard gets it wrong. As it stands, the page size has been set to smaller than it needs to be and the margins are all set to zero, and there is no way to change the page size once the page has been created.

It would also be advantageous to be able to change the page size once the labels have been created.

Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 9:53 am
by COBS Tech Support
No, because it's very useful to know what the page size is if you're working with label printers. Defaulting to A4 in this context would be unhelpful. Visual Builder margins are for controlling regions of the page where objects can be printed consistently (i.e., headers and footers) and are not used for page size control.

The page size can be changed by setting a different page size for your printer (if the printer works correctly, which is true most of the time).

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 1:55 pm
by coldrick
One for the wishlist then:-

Please fix the labels wizard so it correctly identifies the printing range for ALL printers (not just most of them). The printers we use are Brother HL-2040 and they are set up correctly for A4 sized paper.

Restricting access to changing a page size once the form has been created is pretty unconventional. It means your users will have to recreate their forms from scratch (including all coding) if they ever want to use a different printer or page size.

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 5:01 pm
by COBS Tech Support
"Please fix the labels wizard so it correctly identifies the printing range for ALL printers (not just most of them). The printers we use are Brother HL-2040 and they are set up correctly for A4 sized paper."

Please don't complain to us. All that we can do is ask the driver to give us the page size by accessing the printer API of the driver. If the driver returns the physical page incorrectly, there is nothing we can do about that. Epson and HP are some of the worst culprits when it comes to writing defective printer drivers, unfortunately.

"Restricting access to changing a page size once the form has been created is pretty unconventional."

Sorry, don't know what you are talking about here. Nothing is "restricted". The form always inherits whatever page size the printer is set to, or whatever the printer tells the application what it's page size is.

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 6:18 pm
by coldrick
The form always inherits whatever page size the printer is set to, or whatever the printer tells the application what it's page size is.


So are you saying that if we edit the form and set the default to a different printer, the page size should change?

We're not complaining to you about the printer drivers being incorrect, but rather that you are relying on them to set the printable area of the lables, and it doesn't always work. As you say, the driver settings are not always correct. So why not use a method that is always correct and set the page size to a standard A4 and allow the user to change the margins? It's just a suggestion as to a way you can improve your product to make it more user friendly. It's up to you whether you want to do that.

We already have a workaround which involves sacrificing 5mm of our labels. The only other alternative seems to be to change our printers and hope that we get one that not only prints to our labels (like our current printers do using Word), but also has the correct settings in the printer driver (which apparently our current ones don't - and neither do many Epson or HP models according to the previous post).

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 6:33 pm
by COBS Tech Support
"So are you saying that if we edit the form and set the default to a different printer, the page size should change?"

Correct. Or if you changed the page size of that printer and loaded the form back in. (Assuming the printer driver worked correctly.)

"So why not use a method that is always correct and set the page size to a standard A4 and allow the user to change the margins?"

This then puts the onus on the user to get the margin correct. How would the user know what the correct margin is? Except through trial and error? For example, a laser printer cannot print to the very edges of the top or bottom of a page, so even if you set it to A4, the physical page size available for printing will be smaller.

Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 6:40 pm
by coldrick
Better to be able to set it correctly through trial and error than not to be able to set it correctly at all...