Geek Pop Quiz, printing edition!

[theweaselking]

Pop quiz:

You have an 11.5x11 document.
You have 11x11.5 paper in the printer.

1) You need the first printed on the second - basically, you need it rotated 90 degrees off true (in either direction, you don't care which)
BUT
2) You can have no distortion or resizing, and no artifacts added, in the final document.

I say this *should* be as simple as selecting "landscape" instead of "portrait" when printing, but the printer disagrees with me.

Any suggestions?

Comments

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

What program are you printing from?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

CorelDraw, right now.

But they have options.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Obviously it would be great if the printer just agreed with your logic, but that's computers for you

1) You can export to PDF and then see if it agrees with your logic.
2) Change the canvas size of your document, select all and rotate everything together as one object and then print and see if the printer now agrees with you.

There's more options, but one of these usually fixed my disagreements with the printer

[larabeaton.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest something similar to #2. Select all objects on the page and group them. Rotate the entire group by 90 degrees. Change the paper size to be equal to the paper size of what you have in the printer.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

PDF print options should happily rotate and resize without artifacting. I don't think you'd have to even edit the PDF itself.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Firk, it's been ages. Alter the page setup in the program, rather than just telling the printer to change orientation?

[ryusen.livejournal.com]

since DRAW is a vector program, can yo just rotate the whole image 90deg?

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

And I'm also assuming you can't load the paper in the other way?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Nope. The largest tray in the machine is 11x17, with the "17" side adjustable. However, 11 is as big as the other direction goes.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

I figured as much, but wouldn't that be an awesome answer?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not as long as the printer doesn't know the size of the paper.

(My personal suggestions of "Landscape button!" and "rotate the image 90 degrees and reprint" and "there's a service contract on that printer, call *them* and ask why it's not working the way we want it to" have unfortunately not yet resulted in a working solution.)

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

Landscape... button? Usually landscape/portrait is an option in the printer driver (Properties on the Print dialog), not a button on the printer. Switching with a button on the printer would mean you also need to tell the printer driver that the size has changed, but not the orientation. Easier to just change the orientation and keep the size.

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

Save the thing to be printed as an image, use something like paint to rotate the image 90 degrees, and print?

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

"No artifacts," he said. I think serious graphics programs can rotate without artifacts, but I'm not sure Paint can---can it?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Paint can't - but that's not the point. The real problem is convincing the damn program to alter the *paper size* at the same time as it rotates the image.

I keep thinking this should be easy and the answer should be simple. The problem is twofold:
A) all the simple solutions were already tried before anyone asked me
and
B) none of them worked without distorting the graphs or the Braille.

[gryphart.livejournal.com]

Doublecheck that the printer will print borderlessly, as that could be the problem.

I'd also flatten and import it into Photoshop, if possible, since I seem to have better luck with PS printing intelligently.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

CorelDraw is a vector program, white Photoshop is a bitmap program. Hauling into Illustrator however might have some promise if all else fails.

[catblade.livejournal.com]

Gimp is your friend.

[j-v-lynch.livejournal.com]

What version of Corel Draw?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think they're running 10.

Yes, ten. One-zero.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that I'm not certain what to blame: the printer or the program.

This is a half-assed suggestion, but do you have Inkscape? I can't tell if it can import Corel Draw files (possible hitch number one), and I obviously can't know how well it will rotate your image for you (more likely hitch two), but Inkscape is also vector (uses SVG) and should be a better option than a photo* program.

I have found it very flexible for my own work, maybe you'll get lucky.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I have Corel Photo-Paint not Draw so I can't be 100% certain that my response has any relevance whatsoever. You're right that it should be as easy as selecting landscape instead of portrait and I have no idea why that might not work. As far as properly rotating the image goes, in Photo-Paint, at least, there is a rotate option under two different menus, and the one under the "image" menu rotates the entire thing including canvas and all layers, while the other one only rotates the image or whatever portion of it might be selected. You might want to check through the menus of Draw to see if it also has a second "rotate" somewhere.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

In the printer properties setup, force everything to manual control if you haven't already (paper source and paper size especially), then try both portrait and landscape. (This is based on CorelDraw 8 behaviours, which may or may not match CDR10.)