Scaling Pages

Overview

Kappris, because it is not a "physical" printer, can "print" right up to the edges of the page. A physical printer cannot do this.

An application that prints to Kappris will be told that it can use the whole page to print upon. Despite this, most applications will actually set sensible margins and avoid printing right up to the edge of the page. Some applications, however, will take advantage of having a larger print area and print right up to the edges of the paper.

If Kappris then forwards printout to printer which also can print to the edge of the page, eg a PDF printer, XPS or similar virtual printer, then all will be well and printout will be perfect. If, however, Kappris forwards to a physical printer that cannot print to the edges, the printer will clip image.

Demonstration

In order to demonstrate this we printed to Kappris using Internet Explorer having used Internet Explorer's page setup to set the page margins to zero. We have some development tools and text editors that will attempt to print right at the page margins anyway but we thought it best to demonstrate using software that all Kappris users will have available to them.

We then printed a page from Wikipedia via Kappris a) to a PDF printer and b) to a physical printer. We had to scan the physical printer output to show what happened.

PDF

Note that when Kappris prints to PDF all printout is complete, right up to the edges of the page.

Physical Printer

Note that the printer is unable to print to the edges of the page.

Solution

Kappris can solve this issue by "scaling" the image to ensure that it fits into the printable area of any printer.

Turning on scaling for one application

Scaling can be turned on for an application by creating an Application Integration object for that application. Kappris will use the object to identify the application and will use automatic scaling whenever that application is printing.

• Run the Kappris Control Panel, KpMgr.exe
• Select Application Integration
• Create a new App Integration
• On the Advanced tab of the App Integration properties, check "Use auto-scaling"
• Save your changes and publish your configuration.

Example:

Setting up an Application Integration for Adobe Reader

Create a new Application Integration and call it (for example) "PDF"

Identify the application to which this Application Integration should bind by entering some text that Kappris should search for in the path to the executable. In this case we have used "acrord32.exe".

Tell Kappris that it should use scaling when this Application Integration is in operation by checking the "Use auto-scaling" checkbox

Now publish your configuration and you will find that documents printed to Kappris from Adobe Reader will scale if they attempt to print outside the printable area of the destination printer.

Turning on scaling for ALL applications

Scaling can be turned on for all applications by editing the default Application Integration object. .

• Run the Kappris Control Panel, KpMgr.exe
• Select Application Integration
• Bring up the properties of the App Integration called "Default"
• On the Advanced tab of the App Integration properties, check "Use auto-scaling"
• Save your changes and publish your configuration.

Most "common" applications set their own, sensible, print margins and they will be unaffected by this. However, PDFs are nearly always full page so scaling would occur whenever you print a PDF to any printer. This is normally desirable anyway.