My printouts methods with MANY copy-print problems

 The story is quite long with nearly my history of using computers

At first I started around 90s when I used an Amiga system. Its writer could only write to around 15 pages and then the programs memory could  get full . I  remember writing my first fantasy story that was abruptly stopped after writing around 15 pages and then  printed in a useless perforated paper , used before in a company for accounting purposes . This was around early 90s  

It was around 1993 or later  once to print a very long material related to mellitus for  the mother of a  friend.

Printing formatted txt was quite slow that time, One page required around one minute in this perforated paper. This happened on the mid90s after installing a Windows XP PC

My next printer was a HP colour printer. And finally after some years it was broke  I then added a the Laserjet12 again from HP with quite big cartridges Due to the volume of material used to print a many times replaced the ink with genuine or not ink

My new PC with windows 7 after 2012 could not operate it . I found some compatible  drivers that di the work quite close but with some gaps in between pages

Around 1995 my eyes started get irritated from the long exposure in PC screens and soon I started wearing eyeglasses. Even after that I still  use the same glasses tough I know that I have to change them asap

At that time I preferred to use as as small as possible  font to keep as much text in a page.  

Many times that material used required some reformat I used the Word for Windows since early 2000s but after a short time I changed in using WordPerfect which I had a few better formatting operations One of these was to fill predetermined    space on the page with the appropriate line spacing and or font size. This program  supported a few macros so that I could  reformat the page by my own

Later again returned back to Word and  did the same with macros. This macro below is very useful but a few plugins were not kept. This year I tried to remake it by adding the wrap command but the recorded code does not operate properly The reason it introduces it om rich formatting even if the code does not  show that .

In a nutshell the idea  consisted of:

• Format the page with limited gap between text (1 cm instead of 3+ )
• Add page number
• Add some  title in the page number part
• Justify the text in both ends
• Shrink line spacing
• Reformat text in case there is  not number columns (not spacing )
• Keep the text in its  formatting if there are number columns
• Otherwise change the text font .
• If  the text is old time formatted (80 characters  width )  try to wrap it up if possible
• Add a half line space above the wrapped text

 

This is the main idea on printing  standard texts as send via email . That includes long  newsletters mostly related to Dx (as BCDX DXLD DX Window etc on older times ) interesting copy paste articles from the web an a few ‘mined’ pages for book conversion.

Yes I have converted a few old sites into books. One of them is the Attitude is Everything that is kept in a perforated binding That was happened on 2000+ This year I was looking to find the mined material  but was in an  older damaged HD and the program  does nor work anymore. 

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 this ia a printout of 1999 when the main site was alive, They later stopped
The font size is now too small for my eyes..Just zoom in!

Many times I also liked to print the material in  sevral ways

·   2/1 front rear as the copy centers call  . that is 2 pages in one printed page , that is a total of 4 pages in one sheet
In this case the printout is using Arial  font between 12.5 to 14 picas, around 4.5 mm tall for capitals . A draft mode for more cases 

a typical printout fom a web page with some minor photo shrinking
the story  refers to a tablet enabled raspberry receiver

 

-   Perforated 2/1
The same as above but bonded  into a plastic spiral .  I used that fom the start in case of huge printouts 

 

 info from quora related to SEA 

·   Booklet format
This format is very good for portability  especially for small DX newsletters in caseyou wish to retain  them for very log usage . I did that for the Dx  Window for older times As asked Anker Petersen  he sent the text in DOC format and I did some more format re-editing changing the font and its size

this photo is reupload as blogger does not find the link in the Goosites

·   Perforated booklet print

There is is the same printout but bonded into a  spiral Good  for keeping huge material into thick  book, that could be kept forever 

 

his  is from a old booklet related a scanner i given then using  screw ring instead of spiral . 

 

A full web page related to digital signals converted in print version for my personal usage

and finally

·   Binder  perforated  2/1 FR

This was specially usd for keeping all the seasons of radio newsletters . Punched in the middle with perforator and kept in the plastic classer or how is called and  cut with scissors!

Used primarily for WWDXC top news printouts  and DXLD for older times. After the session expired the material is removed , littered and new material is kept for the current DX session. 

Older printouts were made using screen font as courier that later u changed into Lucida without making any special rich formatting

on 2005+ then i used the rich formatting and kept the printouts in the booklet size and ain a few times using the perforated booklet with text wrap It was rather a pain in the ass as it required more time for nothing 

Finally i preferred to first use the monospaced - Lucida in case-  font and then changed into Arial and experimenting with other fonts for easier viewing

my older way on printing the newsletters Ivo's newsletter

 

This is the format  use the last 5 years ! 

 the fonts i mostly use

A few special cases referred mostly to Dxing only 

This is a frequency printout form various DX lists , useful for chacking 

this is the older version,made in a preformed table in Word  and updated as new info is collected
the listing is then deleted after the new session
sent to the copy centres in pdf format

 

 

PDFs 

This is  a very bad story that none can understand me . There were so many clashes with employees in several copy centers in the town. One of them and neighbour stopped to process these copies.

As later there were PDFs I only used an old version of Foxit software verion (2.0 or 3.0 ) to shrink or zoom  the page to fit better into the A5 format

There were many cases authors prefred to use a very small font size with some big gap to the edges, as the standd offered by WOrd with 3.5 cm over and around the main text.   i many times needed to "reprint' form the Foxit ereader  by overscaling (or overzooming the page ) by nearly removing the gaps and over all page . Unfortunately this makes problem to the text : the lower part of the fonts  is truncated. As for example the p is shown as o ! 

Now see a few examples that the printing offices cant help even if pressed in full 

Here is the original format as sent to the printing office and cropping blank gaps : 

This is the screenshot on how it was re-printed in my PDF This si the first ever time i prefered to print a web page in color From DK0K  . Ther reason is simple:  these are waterfalls and cannot be well seen in case of  gray shades 

 

And  here is  the printout Now see that the gaps are bigger than necessary . The good in this case is that the fonts are quite big
He rationalized himself that he set the page in auto size 

Now an even worse case that irritates the eyes for much more 

 this is the first two pages from again the DK0K's  page. He used a fonts of around 10-11 picas and converted the DOC file using the standard gaps as  offered by his wordprocessing program . If printed in A4 there is no problem but if using A5 format format the fonts get less than 8 picas. For younger prople there is not a problem but quite difficult for me 

If the copies peron could do his job properly he could adjust lessen the gaps by using auto zoom autozoom or fit to page option . But he is very very lazy to do that.really i was his only customer

 

He just printed with less than 100% and why ? Font is even smaller than the screens! Just measuring the printed with the screens yields of shrinking by 81%

This is what  he had to do as required : Auto Zoom [+18% are measured ]  in order to cover most of the blank gap and make the text more readable . These people can only print a given step without chcking for any adjustments or tailor made copies based into mixing papers as we did in the university 

 

Xeroxing was my second task in the university among solving IT problems document delivery and short timed personal work before re-starting personal work Except of just xerox-printing from the PCs there we did many 'tailor works'  , by collating or separating doc sheets or even 'mashing'  them ! All this work was absoliutely legal.