[reportlab-users] Rendering different sizes on different viewers

[Matej Pivoluska]

Robin Becker napsal(a):

> Paul McNett wrote:
>
>> Paul McNett wrote:
>>
>>> #1 and 2 use the same printer driver, all three use the same 
>>> printer. Can someone tell me what is happening and my workaround 
>>> options? I can probably standardize on Acrobat Reader but the fact 
>>> that I specify a certain size but Acrobat is scaling it down is 
>>> somewhat distressing to me.
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, I just discovered that in the Print dialog of Acrobat Reader 
>> (not the print setup dialog though) there is a default setting to 
>> scale down the document to fit inside the printer margins. If I set 
>> to no scaling, the document prints exactly to my spec (and other than 
>> slight font differences, it prints exactly like the gpdf version - 
>> cool!). However, I worry that normal users aren't going to be able to 
>> handle changing this default setting without whining.
>>
>
> Isn't the scaling done by Acrobat likely to be related to what the 
> printer says it should be? I am constantly annoyed by a 96% scaling, 
> but I have no idea where the scale comes from.


The scale comes from some nasty function that looks at the printer 
driver that says what are the minimal margins for the printer. Probably 
the same value when MS Word cries about tight margins and nonprintable 
areas.

Pdf has more boxes - media box (paper size), crop box (the visible 
content), bleed box (content clipping in production environment for 
"zero margin" printouts), trim box (final dimensions after trimming), 
art box (size of the page including white space intended by the 
creator). I think that setting media box and crop box correctly (with 
more than 1/4" margins) will fix the problem with downscaling in Acrobat.

I do not have the Reportlab installed on the computer that I am using 
for now but when I tried to find something about these boxes in 
documentation from reportlab.org site (1.20 version) I did not find 
anything.

More information:
http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/technotes/pdfboxes.pdf
http://libpdfxx.sourceforge.net/doc/classpdf_1_1page_1_1CInfo.html
http://designorati.com/dtp/graphics-and-pre-press-4/2005/different-types-of-pdfs/
http://www.boscarol.com/pages/cms/820-pdfx.html (see the illustration 
half way down)

Matej