Expert: Alex Gray - 11/23/2004

Question
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Followup To Question -

I've got a custom document size, 25"x9.5. The physical paper is this size. I've got the imposition settings to print 2 pages per signature. That's all fine.

The sheet sizes on the printer drop-down are all standard, and 25x9.5 isn't there. I need to get the real paper size in there so I can choose it, and then everything would be OK.

The Knowledge Base doesn't seem to cover this, so I guess I'm missing some pretty obvious. Ideas, please?

Answer -
Hi, Alex. Thanks for the response. I was not clear on one point which I think made you think that something other than what I intended was wrong.

>Short answer is that there should be a 'Custom' option at the bottom of the list of standard paper sizes

Yes, and I've set this to 12.5x9.5.

>So if you are going to be imposing two copies of your drawing on a 25 x 9.5 sheet, i would expect your Corel page size to be half of this.

Yes, indeed. That was my fault in communicating the question. Sorry.

>The physical paper size should then come into play only when setting the print options at print time.

Yes, exactly!

>Whatever page size you design with, you will still also need to enter the correct physical paper size in the Print Options / Printer properties dialogue in order to be able to place the drawing(s) correctly on the printed page.

And here's the problem! There is no page size that fits. I've got lots of standard ones but nothing that's exactly right. I want to be able to declare a physical sheet size and use that. Then, the imposition will show correctly and I think print correctly. In previous versions, I knew how to do this; it may have involved editing the printer driver. But the HP 1120C driver for Windows XP doesn't appear to allow this.

Do you know of any tutorials or resources for working with custom paper sizes? I may be able to read up on this and figure something out.

Thanks again for spending time with me.

Cheers!
Michael


Answer
<<>So if you are going to be imposing two copies of your drawing on a 25 x 9.5 sheet, i would expect your Corel page size to be half of this.

Yes, indeed. That was my fault in communicating the question. Sorry.

>The physical paper size should then come into play only when setting the print options at print time.

Yes, exactly! >>>


Okay, that's clear now - I thought you were asking about the page size in CorelDraw.

The available printer page sizes are nothing to do with Draw and not under its control. They are entirely governed by what sizes the printer drive makes available, and if it doesn't offer a custom size option, you have a problem.

Easiest is probaly to use a driver for a different printer that supports the same printer language (eg PCL or PostScript), and does offer custom paper sizes.

Otherwise, if the printer driver offers a standard size that is larger than the one you need, you could probably use that with a bit of fiddling with the x/y positioning in page layout options. Or find a bigger HP printer model that does offer larger sizes and use its driver instead. (Generally printer drivers will work on other printers from the same stable and using the same printer language.)

Or if you have an older, maybe edited, driver for your printer that does support the size you want, you could try instaling that driver under XP.

I can't really help much further with such a printer-specific problem.

Alex