Re: Producing postscript for custom paper size (9x12" manuscript paper)?

[John Hawkinson]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote on Tue,  4 Apr 2006
at 12:41:47 +0200 in <address@hidden>:

> >should be generating a %%DocumentMedia comment, which can include
> 
> it does, at least 2.8 does.

Whoops, so it does. Sorry about that.

> >I don't think there were any printer-specifics in the code in my
> >email.  It should work for any compliant Level 2 or Level 3 Postscript
> 
> I thought I saw ManualFeed in there? Doesn't that make sense only for 
> certain printers

In the current patch (which was more intended as "how I solved this"
and not really prepared for verbatim inclusion), /ManualFeed true is
set for level 2 PostScript printers if you have 9x12 paper, because
there is unlikely to be a paper tray containing that paper.

/ManualFeed is part of the postscript standard, and if there are
printers without a manual feed feature, they should simply ignore the
attribute. (Note that /ManualFeed true does not imply that there is
necessarily a separate tray. On some printers, it changes the printers
expectation of how an existing paper input will be used and lets it
disregard what it thinks is in the tray.)

Would you prefer to treat it as an option like 'landscape? E.g.:

        #(set-default-paper-size "manuscript" 'manualfeed)

My impression is that this is just an extra option that won't benefit
anyone and would cause confusion, since I don't think anyone would not
want that option.

> >Is there a reason you don't want to output the /PageSize info?
> 
> No, there's not. I'll gladly consider well written patches to deal with 
> arbitrary paper sizes. The relevant code is in paper.scm ; there needs 
> to be variant of
> 
>   set-paper-size
> 
> which can deal with dimensions, eg. of the form (set-paper-size '((9 . 
> in) (12 . in)) 'landscape)

This is a different problem, and one that seems a little less critical
to solve. It's easy enough for people to edit paper-alist to add new
paper types.

The problem I'm concerned with is once you do that (or if you defined
a set-paper-size that understood dimensions), LilyPond doesn't output
the paper size in the pagedevice dictionary, so printers do not select
the correct size paper.

--jhawk