Inverting first page

[Chris Stammers]

Hello,

We have a document we need to produce which is in a kind of booklet form to
be folded to A5 landscape. To get this to print properly, we need to invert
the first page and the first page only. One of our programmers has included
this code:

{ PRINT "? & a 180 P" \* MERGEFORMAT }

however it doesn't seem to want to print. We are using Word 2002, printing
to either a Canon iR105 or a Canon iR7086 printer. Should this code work or
is there anything else we could try?

Many thanks.
Chris

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Whether this works depends on whether...
a. your printers have a passthrough facility in the driver (nowadays it's
typically just Postscript and PCL printers, and it may vary depending on the
version of Windows too). It's probably easier to test using a printer escape
sequence that has some really visible result.
b. the escape sequence is in the right printer "language" for the printer.
Typically that depends on which driver you are using (e.g. you may have PCL,
PostScript and a printer language specific to Canon). I would guess in this
case it might be either PCL or an Epson emulation
c. whether the escape sequence is actually correct, and whether "180" is
supposed to be sent as the digits 1, 8, and 0, or as the binary number 180.
d. whether the escape sequence does exactly what you want (are you trying
to invert the first /A4/ page of the job, for example)

If the sequence is suppoed to be a text sequence where you send the digits
1,8 and 0, you could probably use

{ PRINT "?&a180P" }

(I would leave the \*MERGEFORMAT out)

Or if the 180 needs to be a binary number, you can enter the code as a
sequence of decimal numbers, e.g.

{ PRINT 63 38 97 180 80 }

or you may be able to use a mix, possibly

{ PRINT "?&a"180"P" }

 

[Chris Stammers]

Many thanks Peter. I will pass this on to our programmers and see what they
come up with.