Ricoh Aficio MP 4500: Taming the Beast
Categories: [ IT ]
I tried to use one of these wild devices to print a Letter landscape document on microperforated Letter sheets… in an A4 world.
When the printer is set to use A4 paper, it won't pay attention to the PostScript file telling it that the paper format is Letter. The result is that the print would be correctly positioned on an A4 sheet, but is shifted up the actual Letter sheet, because the letter sheet is aligned with the bottom of the would-be A4 sheet.
The solution is to feed the beast only portrait documents, centered on an A4 page, then shift the document 2.5mm to the left to compensate for the fact that it aligns the page's right border with the sheet's right border. This gets it really centered on the Letter sheet (it should be 3mm to account for the width difference between Letter and A4, but even A4 pages are shifted by 0.5mm; it would be too easy otherwise).
Finally, the bottom edge of the printed document is on the side of the back of the beast (the one that is against the wall, opposite of the control panel). This is important for the microperforated paper which has a smaller bottom margin than the top margin.
[ Posted on February 20th, 2009 at 17:04 | 4 comments | permanent link ]
Seriously, should I just send you a ream of Letter-sized paper so you don't have to fiddle with it?
:P
P.S. The weird glitch where I can't click inside this comment box is back. Clicking on any of the other three fields works, but when I click this one it highlights the text in the Name field.