Change A4 paper for Letter

Jielle,

Let's take this one step at a time. What print jobs are you creating with which programs? Are you using a full version of Acrobat which includes the pdf writer "printer" to generate a pdf file? You said you were "making" a pdf file and then using Acrobat 5 to open it and print it. Is this file being generated by your invoice software, then you are using the PDF writer to print the results to a file which you are then opening with Acrobat 5 to print?

The reason for my asking all this is I have just been looking at an older version of Acrobat writer on my computer here. I cannot get it to default to anything but letter (I'm using a US OS so the default is different). The instructions given before about using the option key when clicking "OK" in page setup seems to work fine when I am using the laserwriter printer, but these new defaults do not transfer over to the pdf writer when I choose it as a new printer (and yes, I am quitting applications between changing printers). The option key doesn't seem to work the way it does with the laserwriter printer. I suspect this is something to do with Acrobat and I don't know if there's anything we can do.

If you are not generating the file the way I said then I am puzzled by the default not changing, although maybe if you are using a third party printer driver it may not be configured to let you do that. I only have the Apple laserwriter one on my computer and it clearly lets me change the default when I hold down the option key when clicking OK. If you have an application that is already open then you must quit it, but after that it keeps whatever default you have set up. I was mostly working with simple applications to test this but this included Acrobat Reader 4 and it would always open to whatever default setting I had configured before.

So:

Open an application, and a document if necessary.

Select File/Page Setup

Change the default to letter

Hold down the option key at the same time as you click "OK" The computer will ask you if you want to change your defaults, and you say yes.

If you close the application or open any new ones and look in page setup it should show the new default. If you have any applications already open they will not show the changes until you quit and reopen them.

Cheers,

Jielle,

Don,

Limnos,

Please disregard my previous message. Sorry, missed the non-PostScript part. I suppose that Samsung's own CLP-500 driver is installed. Would it be reasonable to assume that this driver is the same all over the world, and that the default page size always is A4?

Jan

Sorry we couldn't get it to work for you Jielle.

Actually a CD drive isn't too expensive to replace if you do the labor yourself. I bet you could find somebody with an old CD read-only drive that they have sitting around unused from an upgrade they did that they would give you for free. I got a CD burner for my G3 from a PC that was being discarded by people in another office, so it doesn't necessarily have to be a Mac drive. You could probably get an used CD-ROM for $5, or a new one for $20.

Jielle,

Are you using Acrobat or just Acrobat Reader? Acrobat Reader won't let you re-save the document. This is probably a case of the "higher" applications to which Don was referring where the format is saved in the initial software generating the file. Your only work-around for this would be to have the person sending you the file set their layout to letter when they generate the .pdf file, or for them to send you the file in whatever application format was used originally so you could then specify the page layout.

I'm not a highly experienced Acrobat user and I'm not sure that even if you had a full version of Acrobat that you could re-format the document using that. Usually when you want to generate an Acrobat document in OS 9 you use whatever software you used to generate the document (say, Word) to print to an Acrobat printer (really just a piece of software) in Chooser. You then use the Acrobat program to do extra page order editing on this Acrobat file if necessary, but usually it is generated in the desired format from the actual generating application.

As to your invoice printing software, it sounds like it is specially designed to not present you with any options, but I really can't tell without looking at it. It may be that the page layout for your invoices is really designed for A4, not letter. I have a database in letter format I use all the time and if you tried printing to A4 with it then it would spill over onto partial sheets of paper. The invoice software developer may have deliberately avoided giving you the page choice setup when printing to avoid this kind of issue. You may normally click on a button to print, but are there really no options in the File menu for printing which might get you to the setup options?

[Edited by Moderator]

Jielle,

I remember this problem, but in the other direction, when using a North-American English StyleWriter printer driver in a Swedish 7.x operating system. So, without being familiar with 9.2.2, I guess (and that is only a guess) that the French LaserWriter extension is internally pre-set to A4 (and in order to change this something like ResEdit would be needed). If you are willing to carry out some experiments, you could perhaps try to replace the French extension with a US one. A separate installation of drivers (such as the files

here), other than those on the system CD, is usually never recommended, so the result is possibly going to be a completely disturbed system and data loss. Proceed at your own risk (preferably, run a test on another computer without any important files). I may be totally wrong here, and would therefore welcome any comments from Don or Limnos.

Jan

Jielle,

You could try Jan's suggestion with installing the US version of the drivers. You will want to back up critical files first, and maybe the system too so if you have to revert you can just replace the edited version and not have to reconstruct it all from a new installation. I don't think anything calamatous will happen though. One thing that you may find is that you get a message saying you have different versions. I got this once when I tried using a Quicktime 6 component in Quicktime 5. A little judicious hacking of the file type cured this, but I don't know if this is beyond you, or if it would work in this case. You're just using a different language version, but maybe something like different word lengths dictating menu box layouts might be something the system developers might feel a need to prevent you from mixing language versions. It's worth a try though if you are up to it.