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Printer Commands Creating Stair Step Effect
DocumentID: 633733
Revision Date: 29-Feb-96 3:03:24 PM

The information in this document applies to:
WordPerfect® 5.1 for DOS

Problem

Symptoms: The user has a scanned signature that he "converted to be a soft font." In WordPerfect 5.0 he has been using several printer commands to get the signature to print, and it was working fine. Now that he has updated to WP 5.1 it doesn't work.

In WP 5.0 he would simply enter four printer commands, each followed by a hard return to have the signature print correctly. The signature was blocked into three horizontal blocks: the top third of the signature was one block, the center of the signature was the second block, and the bottom third of the signature was the third block.

In WP51 when he tried to do the same thing using the same printer commands, the top third of the signature would print fine, then the second third would not print below the top third; it would print to the right, and the third block of the signature would stair step further down and to the right. In other words, it would print like
      first
            second
                  third
instead of:      first
                  second
                  third


When he put the printer commands in with the hard return directly after the printer commands, the stair stepping would occur. When he put a space between the printer command and the hard return in the document it would work fine. Solutions: screen, you would notice that WP sends a vertical motion code for each line you have requested, but will only send a horizontal position for the first line. Since WP sees no horizontal motion made, it saves time and code by not sending the horizontal motion code for each blank line. A printer command is not considered to be a movement, so WP treats the lines accordingly. If you add a space after the command, WP will detect motion and will need to send a horizontal motion code to set the position back to the left margin for the next line. The problem specialist tested with the 5/30/90 release of 5.0 and found that it worked the same way as 5.1. If WP did decide to consider a printer command as a horizontal movement, then it could not be the first code in the document, because this would effect any other WP code that needed to be prior to any movement on the page, i.e., paper size and type code. The best option is to use what the customer is already doing--putting a space after each printer command.

Answer:

Details:


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