🚀 go-pugleaf

rao@hsi.com (Ananth Rao) writes:

>>Does anyone have a Portrait Prologue to output postscript to
>>Legal (A4 size) paper?
...

>Also to access our HP laserjet IIIsi's lower tray which holds the legal size
>paper, I had to include the following code toward the bottom of a2ps.c and 
>define the variable LEGAL in the above Makefile line with '-DLEGAL'.
>
>    #ifdef LEGAL
>       printf("statusdict begin\n");
>       printf("1 setpapertray\n");
>       printf("end\n");
>    #endif
>
>I'm sure there must be simpler solutions than this, but we use this 
>combination extensively especially for landscape mode printing on legal paper.

Aack!  Going beyond device-dependent PostScript we now have an example
of installation-dependent PostScript.  The above code assumes that a
legal tray is loaded into tray position #1.

May I recommend...

	/languagelevel where
	{  pop languagelevel 2 eq
	   {   1 dict dup
	       /PageSize [612 1008] put
	       setpagedevice
	   }
	   {   statusdict begin legaltray end
	   }
	   ifelse
	}
	{  statusdict begin legaltray end
	}
	ifelse

Actually, level 2 printers typically include "legaltray" as an alias
for "<</PageSize [612 1008]>> setpagedevice", so just "statusdict
begin legaltray end" is good enough on all printers, but the example
also illustrates the incantation for detecting whether one is on a
level 2 printer.

By the way, A4 paper is not the same as legal paper.  Legal is 8.5" x 14",
A4 is 8.27" (210 mm) x 11.69" (297 mm).  Statusdict also contains an
"a4tray" procedure.

These procedures return errors ("configurationerror" from
"setpagedevice", or "rangecheck" from the "...tray" procedures) if the
appropriate tray is not loaded.