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Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Landscape printing

Luke,

--On 10 July 2006 11:45 +0100 Luke Hart <lukeh@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


Should changing the orientation of printing work? I have tried to print
the bluecar example, and no matter which orientation I choose the design
is clipped either at the bottom or on the left. I have made sure that the
design is setup for landscape A4 pages, and the printer driver is also
setup the same. When landscape printing is selected it seems that the
design is started half-way down the page and is cut-off near the bottom
of the left headlight. This may be a mis-configuration on my part, but I
can't see where I have gone wrong.


Yes and no. It should work in the sense the page is rotated in Xtreme,
but it will always think the physical page is portrait A4 at the moment,
because it isn't currently reading printer page dimensions, so when
you are changing the orientation in the print setup dialog (i.e
the native print dialog) it's having no effect. As with Xtreme (I
think - this is what's recommended in the manual) the best thing to
do is leave the print setup dialog as is.


Even portrait doesn't seem to work quite right, since only part of
amurdove is printed (vertically from the dove's beak to the cherubs left
toes and horizontally from intersection of bow and top of right arm to
tip of left wing). This part seems to be lacking a lot of detail, a lot
of the cloth that is draped over the cherubs lap is missing.


I'm not sure why that should be. Sounds like a bug.


Finally the "rainbow color fill" fractal in 'fill types simple' is not
the correct colors, it's blue, black and white. The top of this design is
missing, though this is probably due to it being on a custom sized page.


OK, that sounds like a bug. I'll have to try that one out on Xtreme
and see if it does the same thing.


The printer is taking a long to render these designs (~10-15 minutes for
the amurdove and fill types), XaraLX is printing them in ~5 seconds.


That's a bit odd. When you say "render" do you mean the start to the
end of a progress bar in LX? That's never taken me more than 20 seconds.
Or do you mean the time taken until first page out? That takes a fair
while if Ghostscript has lots of bitmaps to do, made worse by the fact
I'm not reading the printer's resolution and assuming 600dpi at the moment.
If the printer is (say) 150dpi colour, that's 16 times as much work to do.

Can you tell me a bit more about the printer and printer driver you
are using on Windows? If you export the whole lot as a 600dpi bitmap
and print from (say) a gnome app (preferably not GIMP as that has
a faster route), is it just as slow? What you might be finding is that
Ghostscript thrashes when printing bitmaps - not a huge amount I can
do about that (at least until I can read the printer resolution right).

Alex