🚀 go-pugleaf

Page formatting with word processor and drawing applications such as
WriteNow and MacDraw has an annoying quirk for those of us who use a
Mac at home with an ImageWriter, but who often must print their documents
at work on a LaserWriter.

The problem is that the LaserWriter margins are somewhat narrower than
those available on the ImageWriter, since the page coverage of the
LaserWriter is a little indented on all sides.  If you're trying to
squeeze the maximum into a page (a bad practice, I agree) and you do
a "Page Setup" using the Imagewriter, you usually truncate information at
the right margin when you print the document on the LaserWriter.

The really annoying "gotcha" here is that it's simply not possible to
"fool" your home Mac into using the narrower margins by installing the
LaserWriter driver and using the Chooser to pick a non-existant printer.
WriteNow, in fact, won't even run unless there is a real, honest-to-
goodness printer corresponding to the output device you choose.

Some programs, such as MS Word 3.0x, allow you to set the page size
albitrarily.  However, MacDraw has no explicit margin settings other than
those determined by the physical page size, and so you're stuck.  It would
be really nice if Apple added left, right, top, and bottom margins to all
their printer driver dialogs.  Of course, it would be even nicer if there
were a universal method of setting arbitrary page sizes, as it is now
possible in FileMaker Plus.  Hopefully, Claris has addressed this problem
in the much-ballyhood but still gaseous MacDraw II.

Disclaimer:  These are personal opinions and misinformation, not those of
the General Electric Company.

-Bill Leue
leue@ge-crd.arpa
uunet!steinmetz!nmr!leue