Re: Selecting Papersize

[Steve Izma]

On Sun, Jul 09, 2023 at 12:33:01PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Subject: Re: Selecting Papersize

> Possibly, his answer to the question of how to handle a laser
> printer with multiple trays serving different paper formats
> would have, in 1984 or so, have been "write a device
> description for each tray; that way you know what you'll be
> getting".
> 
> I could be wrong, because one of the things such an approach
> forecloses is the possibility of printing (in one run) a
> document that employs multiple paper formats.  An example that
> is certainly _not_ a contrivance is the simple matter of
> rotating the format, so that one could fit really wide tables
> onto some pages of a document using U.S. letter or A4 paper.

I'd like to return to this issue of changing paper sizes with
single documents, since I think I have a different use case.

In my decades-long experience in typesetting scholarly material
(the most likely source of very wide tables) I've never found the
need to change paper size to accommodate such tables. Possibly,
this is because editors force authors to rethink and re-cast
their tables to be more easily digestible, i.e., so that the
reader can see the data relationships in a simple scan.

Also, it's pretty easy to rotate a table on a page so that it
reads landscape but the other elements on the page that need to
remain portrait -- like headers or footers -- remain in their
proper place. This, I think, makes rotating an entire page in
mid-document unnecessary or possibly even bad design.

On the other hand, there are probably good usage cases for
non-academic mixing of page sizes, but that raises the question:
what's the relationship between changing paper size mid-document
and getting the the printer to change trays? As far as I can tell
from my experience with PostScript printers, an unexpected
paper-size change (e.g., asking for Legal from a tray that holds
Letter) causes the printer to pause with a panel message asking
for the operator to switch paper sizes for that tray. I think
I've had difficulties even when the printer has the proper size
in a different tray. So I don't think we can trust all printers
to automatically switch trays. In any case, wouldn't it be safer
to assume that a paper-size switch should be accompanied with a
paper-tray switch?

Also, I think it would be useful to switch trays -- e.g., from
plain paper to glossy paper -- in mid-document for the output of
high-quality images on the same size of paper. That would make
something like a "\X'ps: papertray xx'" or "\X'ps: InputSlot=xx'"
very useful.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma@golden.net  phone: 519-745-1313
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==
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therefore never scrutinize or question.
    -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996