I found one this week that had me stumped for a day.

I have an environment file with PCL escape sequences that flips the page to portrait mode and uses 80 columns in Courier bold font at 10 pitch.   We have over a hundred of LDEVs that use this environment file and we have used it over 14 years without a problem.  It doesn't matter if it uses A4 or U.S. Letter.  It works in Native mode and a 3rd party spooler.

But for one remote printer in a foreign country, users told me it was truncating LDEV output to 78 columns and claimed the output was too wide for the A4 paper.  The spool file (which was SPSAVE'd) still showed 80 columns on my test prints.  

As mentioned above, other printers in foreign countries using A4 paper did not have this problem.

A wild goose I was chasing before I found the solution was the "Edge to Edge" parameter.  This is a red herring, don't go there.

After a day of dickin' with it, I found a relatively new parameter I had never heard of before called "WIDE A4" = NO/YES.  (Google was my friend.)

Turns out you have to set it to YES or else it masks it at the margins, causing output truncation at the printer for the font in question.  I had to set it locally using a typical web page configuration.

P.S. Don't listen to users when the they tell you the HP3000 is changing the output.  90% of the time they are wrong.  (I'll give them a full 10% they are correct, especially if 3rd party software is involved.)


Tracy Johnson
Office (757) 766-4318
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