Printing on legal size paper

[facetsofdesign]

We are stuck. I swear that we have previously printed on legal size paper and had the plan fill the entire page but now it is printing in the middle of the page as if it was only 8.5 by 11. In page set up we have both the page and sheet size set at 8.5 by 14 and in the printer properties we have the paper set at 8.5 by 14. All are set to landscape. But we still get a reduced image, about 2/3 full size, in the middle of the legal size sheet. What are we missing?

[lbuttery]

Which version of chief ???


Try printing to PDF first, many benefits, one is not to waste paper
while figuring the settings out

Lew

[facetsofdesign]

Thanks, for the suggestion. I just tried printing to pdf and I got exactly the same results. PDF indicates that it is an 8.5 x 14 page in landscape orientation but the plan is still about 2/3 size centered on the legal size page.

[lbuttery]

Which version of chief ???

Lew

[dshall]

I think you should have "print to scale" checked in print dbx.

[Doug Park]

When you print a printing scale needs to be chosen such that your plan fills the paper the way you want. There are several ways of doing this.

Turn on show sheet. It should look the same on screen relative to the sheet as it did when you printed.

Adjust your print scale to fit the sheet the way you would like. Fit to sheet will get you close, but will pick a scale that is somewhat sensible based on the scale you start with. This may not fill the sheet as much as you would like. You may have to pick a fairly odd scaling to do this. If you are going to print multiple times and you want the same results every time then taking the time to set this up is probably worth doing.

Another option is to zoom so that you are showing more or less what you want on screen. Then choose current screen when you print, making sure you uncheck print to scale.

[facetsofdesign]

Thanks for your responses. I will try what you suggest. However, I want to add some more detail to the problem. First, we are using Chief Architect 10. The program was installed on an HP 1195 desktop attached to a HP psc2210 printer. At that point we had no problem with the printing. The scale to fit worked fine and the plan would fill the majority of a legal size page. We then transferred the program to a brand new HP 9740 notebook computer connected to the desktop and printer over a Linksys N-band wireless router. It took several hours of chat sessions with HP to get the notebook to communicate with the desktop and the printer but everything seems to be working fine. I can access any file on the desktop, modify it on the notebook and then send it to the printer and it prints exactly as it does if it were sent to the printer directly from the desktop. Except for Chief Architect, which now wants to print everything as if it was using a letter size page regardless of whether we specify legal size in the page set-up, the sheet set-up and the printer set-up and tell it to scale to fit. And it doesn't make any difference if we open the file up again on the desktop and send it to the printer - the results are exactly the same. So even though I don't see how moving to the notebook could have caused the problem it doesn't change the fact that it worked up until then and now it doesn't. Any more ideas??

[lbuttery]

contact tech support ???

Lew

[louis]

Are any of these machines running Vista?

Is the laptop Vista?

All print setups must be done in your printer defaults.

[Doug Park]

Scale to fit doesn't fill the paper as much as possible. It fills the paper as much as it can without creating a weird scale like .234 in : 1 ft. So the behavior you are describing makes sense.

Double check things by inserting a %scale text macro and make sure it prints the scale you asked for. Also measure an item on the paper and make sure it is to scale.

Some printer drivers have settings that will scale the drawing to fit. If that is what is happening then the scale macro will print correctly but the measurement will be wrong. If these two check out then it is printing exactly what it was told to print.

If the scale is off start poking through the printer driver setting in page setup and see if there is a setting that is changing how things print.