Re: OS X and print defaults

Hi Michael,

In the message "[MAGNet] OS X and print defaults", dated 2003-09-23,
Michael Rimar wrote:

>In OS 9, I could set the defaults for Page Setup by making my
>choices in the dialog window then Option-click OK.
>
>What does one do in OS X?

   In Mac OS X 10.2.x ("Jaguar"), setting the default, system-wide
paper size for printing just requires that you open the "Print
Center" application in /Applications/Utilities, select
"Preferences..." from the application's ("Print Center") menu, and
select your choice of default paper size in the resultant dialog.

   This option does not seem to be present in the Print Center under
Mac OS X 10.1.5, and I don't know if there is another way -- perhaps
by directly editing a configuration file (?) -- to configure this
setting under this version and earlier versions of OS X.

At 13:13 -0700 2003-09-23, Michael Rimar wrote:
>Who uses letter (small) anyway and why is this the default?

   A page on the now-archival "Information Alley" Web site
<http://www.mug.jhmi.edu/mirrors/InfoAlley/1296/12/laserwriter.html>
notes that:

>Some printers support both US Letter and US Letter Small paper
>sizes. To prevent text from clipping or wrapping to the next line on
>different printers, Apple recommends using US Letter Small.

   Another Web page
<http://www.techbase.iofm.net/tips/applemac/tip28.htm> suggests this
paper size may be a workaround for the margin characteristics of
non-Apple PostScript printers:

> The default paper size for the LaserWriter 8.4 changed from the
>standard US Letter option to US Letter Small. The change has nothing
>to do with the paper size, but rather the fact that many printers
>that utilize the LaserWriter printer software have smaller margins
>than most of the Apple printers.

   Presumably those smaller margins on non-Apple printers might have
occasionally resulted in pages being clipped or wrapped, depending on
the size of the imageable page areas on those printers, so the US
Letter Small setting might have been set as the default to improve
users' default printing experience ...

   When you use the US Letter Small paper size, as contrasted with the
US Letter paper size, this will result in your documents being scaled
to print within a slightly smaller imageable area, with
correspondingly larger document margins.

   I haven't yet come across an authoritative statement about this, so
the following statement is unverified: it appears that the US Letter
Small paper size *may* specify document margins fixed at 1.0 inches
(25 millimeters). If you need to set smaller document margins, you
can always switch to using the US Letter page size.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

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Received on Tue Sep 23 14:56:45 2003