leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue) (02/25/91)
Thanks to valuable suggestions by Steve Maller, Martin Gaanholm, David Kaufman, and Kevin Hunter, I was able to finally figure out how to print continuous tractor-feed disk labels from Hypercard 2.0. It turned out to be very easy and did not require any XCMD's or other nasty messing about. The labels in question (Avery 4241) are exactly 3" high. The trick to printing them out without skipping a label or getting the dreaded "label creep" is as follows: 1) In the "Page Setup" dialog, select "International Fanfold" paper. This is 12" high paper. Also, make sure "No Breaks Between Pages" is checked. 2) In the "Print Stack" dialog, set the Top Margin to 0.0", the Bottom Margin to as small as possible (I got 0.062" by holding down the Option key and trying several times), The Left Margin to as small as possible (0.093") and the right margin to anything. Make sure that "space between cards" is 0.0. 3)In your print script, use the "Print card from x,y to x,y" command, and fiddle with the top and bottom pixels until you get the correct spacing between adjacent labels. I had to shorten the print area by 1 pixel less than what the calculated value was for 3": your mileage may vary. To make sure that only 1 label is printed "across", make the right-hand 'x' dimension large -- I uased the full width of the card, and made sure that there was only white space on each card. This works nicely, but it was far from obvious how to do it when I started working. Here's a couple of suggestions for future versions of Hypercard: 1) Make the parameters in the Page Setup and Print Stack dialogs accessible at the scripting level. This should involve just adding a few more Properties. Right now, there is no way (I think) to protect the stack user from having these parameters modified, since you can't set them to the critical values from inside a script. 2) Support wider margins. I don't think you can make the left and bottom margins exactly zero, even with holding down the Option key. You can't, for instance, print on Avery 5196 LaserLabel stock, which has THREE 2.75" disk labels across. Again, thanks to everyone who helped! -Bill Leue leue@crd.ge.com