SUMMARY: Force PDF's to be "A" size...

[DarrinHiebert]

First of all, a HUGE thanks to the community, as always.



Secondly, I humbly admit that I didn't tell you everything that there is
to know about the process in my first email. Several have suggested that
I do things differently, which, at the end of the day, while those
solutions probably do make logical sense, they don't shoehorn into the
plans/process. So changing the way that I do some of this stuff is
somewhat written in soft rock. J



Sufficed to say, I do really need to have a PDF, and I would like to
print said PDF and another document at the same time with no lag between
them. If there's a lag there (like there would be if I printed out of
Pro, and printed the other document with a script), there's a great
likelihood that my work orders and drawnigs will not be synced up at the
printer, and that's what we're trying to avoid.



BUT, with all of that being said, you have ALL helped me find a working
solution to my problem. My printer does take PS files. So, I'm going to
set up a new printer that is PS only, that is A size only, and then I'll
print a PS file, and then print that PS file, and the other document that
I need to print with a commandline print in my batch file that is doing
all of the processing outside of Pro. I'm still going to actually create
the PDF file out of Pro as well, because that's something that we'll be
needing for another part of this project in the future. That will not be
"auto" printed, so the drawing sheet size of the PDF file in that case
doesn't matter.



THANKS again for all of the input!!!



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[kimndave9]

One feature you may run into by forcing pages to "A" size is that PTC postscript generation scales the vectors, but not the line widths.

For stroked text, if the text is to be .010 line thickness and .156 high, then it will still be .010 line thickness when scaled to, say, .030 high. All other graphics get the same treatment.

As of WF5, setlinecap and setlinejoin still have poorly chosen values. The values for both of them should be 1.

To counter the line width problem you can create .pnt files for each original size and scale the pen widths correctly, or create a pen table that has a tiny pen width no matter what the scaling.

You can also edit a Postscript file that is printed to its original size and scale it correctly there.

To try this, edit the ps file (notepad or wordpad or other non-layout text editor) and, after the line 72 72 scale add a new line like 8.5 44 div dup scale. This divides the target size (8.5) by the original size (44), the duplicates that value and then scales the remaining drawing commands.The first 72 is the X scale, the second is the Y scale and Postscript doesn't care if they are not the same number, but you might not like the printed result.

The line near the top, <</pagesize[>> setpagedevice tells the printer what paper to expect. If your printer only handles A size, then clip out the lines from "systemdict" to ") if." It's a hint to the printer, but not required.