🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark, thanks for the reply. Let me give a little more info about what I'm trying to achieve here.

What I *really* need are EPS files. But of course, I have to go through the postscript driver first. The EPS files will be of classified liner ads that people place in newspapers. The majority of them are less than 1 inch in depth/height. So, another twist in this is that the page size is dynamic. Under XP, this involves some creation/modification of custom paper sizes on the fly, but I've solved that one.

What I found was that I could create smaller and smaller page sizes (mostly height values), until I got less than 1 inch. Then, my custom paper size disappears from the list of available page sizes.

I finally contacted Microsoft and inquired about the problem. One of their driver development engineers looked into the code and verified that, indeed, there is a minimum constant for height and width and it is set at...1 inch.

My original question here was whether they *should have* followed the PPD spec and allowed smaller values (although perhaps not zero), and *only* insert their heavy hand and apply the 1 inch minimum if no, or invalid, values were in the PPD.

All this worked under Win98. The process currently runs in that environment. We're trying to move into the 21st century, but Microsoft won't allow it. *My* guess is, a bad design decision was made when this was written for Win2000 (or perhaps from NT). A page has to consist of at least one line of type, right? And if you allow minimum line sizes of 0.7 pts(!), then why not page sizes less than 1 inch?? At this point, they're concerned about what they'd break by changing the constant value and re-compiling (I've been told it was that simple). Of course, then there's regression testing...and there's the rub.

I've tried testing several virtual printer drivers that will produce smaller page sizes, but we're also implementing color capability, which requires RGB -> CMYK color space conversion. We've got the color space conversion tackled as well. The virtual printer drivers I've tested so far won't work with the color conversion tool...yet...working on that still.

So, we can change custom paper sizes on the fly, and convert color spaces, but we can't get a constant changed with a recompile! lol In fairness, when they rejected the change request, Microsoft did tell me I could always write my own postscript driver. <8^o

If you have any other ideas/thoughts, I'd be most appreciative.

-Chris