strange things in Page Setup and Printing

[Johan Henselmans]

I am developing a driver for a ticket printer.

To make things simple a ticket is defined horizontally, eg 8"x3.25".
(Most of the theater tickets etc are formatted this way). Notice, that
would mean that the page is in portrait mode wider as the height is.

That works fine in Excel: I defined a custom paper size of 8x3.25 in
Page Setup, and Excel recognized it as a horizontal page with the size
8x3.25.

But Word did not accept that: it automagically rotates the page to
3.25x8.OK, fine one would say. But now a funny thing happens. In Print
Preview, the page is still vertical. Click on print. Now, in print
preview in the print sheet, suddenly the page is horizontal again.

I would expect the page to be horizontal anyway, like in Excel. But the
autorotate, untill the page get printed makes things really confusing.

Configuration: OS X 10.4.9 Intel MacBook, Office 2004, latest updates
(11.3.4).

Regards,

Johan Henselmans

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

How did you set the custom paper size?

Right way:

Use File>Page Setup. Look at the Paper Size dropdown menu and select
Manage Custom Sizes. You can set a custom paper size in the resulting
dialog. Save your custom size, and then it will appear in the Paper Size
dropdown, where you can choose it.

Wrong way:

In File>Page Setup, you can change the Settings menu from Page
Attributes to Custom Paper Size, and you can enter a paper size, and it
will pretend to work in Word, but when you go to print, it will not
behave. This has caused great confusion for many. IGNORE Settings>Custom
Paper Size. It will lie to you. Use the Manage Custom Sizes dialog.

 

[Johan Henselmans]

Daiya Mitchell schreef:

How did you set the custom paper size?

Right way:

Use File>Page Setup. Look at the Paper Size dropdown menu and select
Manage Custom Sizes. You can set a custom paper size in the resulting
dialog. Save your custom size, and then it will appear in the Paper Size
dropdown, where you can choose it.

Wrong way:

In File>Page Setup, you can change the Settings menu from Page
Attributes to Custom Paper Size, and you can enter a paper size, and it
will pretend to work in Word, but when you go to print, it will not
behave. This has caused great confusion for many. IGNORE Settings>Custom
Paper Size. It will lie to you. Use the Manage Custom Sizes dialog.

Daiya, thanks for the comments. I recreated the document, and now it
works as advertized. It seems there is something strange going on with
the custom page sizes. Perhaps I got a document with a page size that
was exactly the opposite I was using (width 8 x height 3.25 versus width
3.25 x height 8 inch).

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Daiya, thanks for the comments. I recreated the document, and now it
works as advertized. It seems there is something strange going on with
the custom page sizes. Perhaps I got a document with a page size that
was exactly the opposite I was using (width 8 x height 3.25 versus
width 3.25 x height 8 inch).

Glad it is behaving. No idea what might have caused it before--my
comment just flagged a blind alley that has been the solution before.

Daiya