I have a file developed on Mac OS X, with lots of layouts for various reports. On the Mac, these layouts are all printed at 80% landscape, with custom margins (to provide a slightly larger margin at the top, for binding).

I gave a copy of the file to my boss, who is on Windows XP Professional (2000/ServicePack 2). She is unable to get any of the layouts to scale onto one page. She has tried reducing the font size of everything on the layouts so that she can print at 100% landscape, but this hasn't worked, nor has trying to rescale on the page setup options. These are one HP8000 and HP8100 printers, and she says she has installed the latest print drivers. Any idea what the heck is going on?

Chemparrot:

I believe the Windows print setup settings are stored separately from the Mac page setup settings - for anything other than plain vanilla printing, do the settings on the windows machine & save them. They *should* stay fine for your Mac & now work with Windows too.

-Stanley

What I am saying in the second paragraph is that she has tried this, but the printer seems to ignore her settings, and prints everything at 100% anyway - and it doesn't even help to change the layout font sizes so that everything should print, even at 100%. Much of the report is cut off, no matter what she does.

Basically I am wondering if others have had problems going from Mac to WinXP, is this an FM7 issue, a printer (print driver) problem, or what?

I should also mention that she can see the page in preview mode, with the printer settings that she has set/estblished, and it looks fine onscreeen, but then doesn't print as it appears in preview.

My limited experience of developing on a Mac for a Windows machine led me to redoing the Windows print layouts so they could print at 100%. Previews always looked good, but I was never able to reduce output as we can on a Mac. If your application will be used by both Mac and Windows you might have to test to see whether printing is from Mac or Windows and set up separate Print commands for each system based on that test.

Redo how? She has already tried reducing the size of all the fonts on the layout so it shows up all on one page when in preview, but it doesn't print what is shown in preview.

The problem is, we don't know how to get anything to print right from XP in the first place - setting up separate print commands after testing for which system is something on the horizon at this point. We just want to know what we need to try to get a layout to print on one page in Windows, because nothing she has tried (rescaling the print size on the printer setup options; redoing the layout to "fit on one page")has worked.

Is anyone else using HP8000 or HP8100 printers with FM7 and Win XP? How do you scale your output? What considerations do you have when designing layouts? What drivers are you using, and are you using a network print spooler?