Acrobat Options...

[Lester C. Smalley]

Jacob, 

I actually agree with you.  But to make my situation clear, it is not a vendor (as in a print house or service bureau) taking the PDF and generating hard-copy pages from it, rather it is individual users who get the document, print it and over whom I have no control.  

That being said, I do wish there were a way to disable for this document (or even only the one specific page) the Acrobat option to scale the pages to fit the user's chosen output device and instead print the page at the exact original size.  Unless the printer is set up with very small paper, the included diagram will print at 100% original size and not suffer clipping at the margins, as it is approx 5.75" x 7.25" and centered on a standard US Letter (8.5 x 11 inch) page in the PDF.

But as the different users' output device may have different print regions/physical margins, the default in Acrobat is to scale the US Letter page to fit within the printable area, which distorts the dimensions and makes the layout diagram functionally useless.

To end this discussion: it appears there is no option which can absolutely enforce this behavior in Acrobat.  The best suggestion is to include an accurate scale and/or dimensions along with the diagram, and let the user make adjustments to correct for the printer scaling the output if they did not follow the other instructions to turn off the scaling in the viewer when printing this file.

I will see what Richard Comb's and Shlomo Peret's reported as a option for Acrobat 7 that may help, and especially the idea of a pop-up message via JavaScript upon printing.  But the PDF is (currently) designed for use by all versions of Acrobat.  Of course, it would not be the worst thing in the world if user's had to get the latest version of the reader...

- Lester 
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Lester C. Smalley              Email: lsmalley AT infocon DOT com 	
Information Consultants, Inc.  Phone: 302-239-2942 FAX: 302-239-1712	
Yorklyn, DE  19736               Web: www.infocon.com	
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| -----Original Message-----
| From: Jacob Schäffer [mailto:js at grafikhuset.dk]
| Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 05:42 PM
| To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
| Cc: Art Campbell; Lester C. Smalley
| Subject: SV: Acrobat Options...
| 
| Perhaps I missed something important in regard to the PDF-format, so I
| have to make my point clear.
| 
| PDF is itself a VERY accurate format. A PDF document is NOT itself
| scaled to ANY extend. So, why this request at all. I simply don't
| understand it, UNLESS you ASSUME the PDF is output via a print channel.
| In that case your bets are extremely poor, since it actually IS allowed
| -- by concept -- to scale ANY document, by ANY application or printer
| driver, at print time.
| 
| I certainly hope that Adobe is reasonable enough to NOT implement any
| feature into the PDF format that disallow scaling at print time.
| 
| Vendors that accept PDF documents for purpose-specific subsequent
| processing should accept to process native PDF documents as they are.
| If they cannot do that -- for whatever reason, though likely because
| they do not have modern equipment -- they should be wise enough to NOT
| apply scaling in any way at print time. Anything else, for any post-
| process, would be their own responsibility.
| 
| Hence, the request from Lester would not have any meaning at all UNLESS
| Lester doubt about his vendor-capabilities. If so, find another vendor,
| or teach him what to do :-)
| 
| 
| Best regards / Med venlig hilsen
| Jacob Schäffer  |  Chief Developer
| Paradis Allé 22, Ramløse
| DK-3200 Helsinge, Denmark
| Phone: +45 4439 4400
| Email: js at grafikhuset.dk
| Web: www.grafikhuset.net