Understanding the mystery of printing?

Richard Shaw hobbes1069 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 30 13:52:46 UTC 2009


On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 07:28 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
>> I just got a new HP Photosmart C5580 which can (among other things)
>> print on inkjet printable DVDs and CDs. My current goal (probably
>> hopeless :-) is to tweak the .ppd file for the copy of the printer
>> I made which defaults to the DVD tray and DVD paper size so that
>> any application I care to print from will print in the middle
>> of the DVD (a quest that will probably take years and cost
>> thousands of lives :-).
>>
>> My first big mystery came with sample printouts I made of a
>> hashmark pattern I could use to measure how far off from the
>> center I am: Both inkscape and gimp print the pattern with
>> the exact same offsets from the center of the CD, but open
>> office prints with a completely different offset.
>>
>> As near as I can tell, I've told every app the page size is
>> the same and there are no margins. They all print the marks
>> scaled the same with the same distance between marks, so
>> does anyone have any clue why open office thinks the center
>> of the media is in a different place? Is there some obscure
>> printer setup option I missed somewhere in OO?
>>
>> Even if I can figure how to tweak the .ppd file, it won't
>> do much good if different applications use it a different way :-).
> ----
> there is spadmin program
> /usr/lib/openoffice.org3/program/spadmin
> but I'm not sure you will get any additional tweaks there.
>
> try printing to pdf and then using kpdf or AdobeReader to print it.
>
> I am gathering that you are using a non-standard paper size and that is
> where you are having troubles.
>
> Perhaps if you add the paper size to the PPD it might standardize things
> - even for OOo
>
> If it were me doing labels, I'd probably be using Inkscape (likely) or
> gimp to print them anyway.
>
> You also might want to check out glabels
>
> Craig

I use Glabels for DVD/CD printing. If you like I can send you a
template that I already spent hours tweaking in to save you the
trouble. Also, if you haven't done so already, you need to setup a
separate printer cue for the DVD tray/caddie. This helps work around
the fact that not all programs will allow you to change tray settings
on the fly.

Richard




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