Understanding the mystery of printing?

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Fri Jan 30 13:38:51 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 07:28 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> I just got a new HP Photosmart C5580 which can (among other things)
> print on inkjet printable DVDs and CDs. My current goal (probably
> hopeless :-) is to tweak the .ppd file for the copy of the printer
> I made which defaults to the DVD tray and DVD paper size so that
> any application I care to print from will print in the middle
> of the DVD (a quest that will probably take years and cost
> thousands of lives :-).
> 
> My first big mystery came with sample printouts I made of a
> hashmark pattern I could use to measure how far off from the
> center I am: Both inkscape and gimp print the pattern with
> the exact same offsets from the center of the CD, but open
> office prints with a completely different offset.
> 
> As near as I can tell, I've told every app the page size is
> the same and there are no margins. They all print the marks
> scaled the same with the same distance between marks, so
> does anyone have any clue why open office thinks the center
> of the media is in a different place? Is there some obscure
> printer setup option I missed somewhere in OO?
> 
> Even if I can figure how to tweak the .ppd file, it won't
> do much good if different applications use it a different way :-).
----
there is spadmin program
/usr/lib/openoffice.org3/program/spadmin
but I'm not sure you will get any additional tweaks there.

try printing to pdf and then using kpdf or AdobeReader to print it.

I am gathering that you are using a non-standard paper size and that is
where you are having troubles.

Perhaps if you add the paper size to the PPD it might standardize things
- even for OOo

If it were me doing labels, I'd probably be using Inkscape (likely) or
gimp to print them anyway.

You also might want to check out glabels

Craig




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