[OS X TeX] Borderless (or almost borderless) printing

Michael Sharpe msharpe at ucsd.edu
Tue Oct 27 19:07:20 CET 2009


On Oct 27, 2009, at 10:07 AM, <ewan.Delanoy at math.unicaen.fr> <ewan.Delanoy at math.unicaen.fr 
 > wrote:

>          Hello all,
>
>  in my (admittedly limited) experience with
> (WYSIWYG or not) text processors, it is usually impossible
> to have control over the whole of the printed page : whenever
> you try to put something too near the edge, texts and images
> get unpredictably displaced.
>
>  I did not find LaTeX ( or even LaTeX with TikZ)
> different in that respect :
> currently I need to produce tenths of copies of rather small
> (simple geometric) images, so the best and
> most economic way of doing it is to "pave" the A4 sheet I'm printing
> on, with one image in each rectangle.
>
>  AFAIK, even drawing the "pavement lines" (indicating how the sheet
> will have to be cut) is undoable in LaTeX or TikZ. The lines will  
> never
> reach the
> edges of the sheet no matter what ingenious commands one puts in the
> source file.
>
> So my question is : if "doing what you want" on the full sheet is
> impossible,
> what is the next best solution ? What is the largest subrectangle of  
> the
> sheet where LaTeX (or TikZ) commands have a normal, "non-edgy"  
> behaviour ?
>
With PSTricks, one way is to set the margin to 0pt in the geometry  
options, set \parindent to 0pt and \pagestyle to empty, then create a  
pspicture the size of the paper and draw each object using the  
pspicture coordinates. On printout, you will get whatever your printer  
is capable of, which means it will likely cut off a few millimeters of  
each edge. Here's how this would work on letterpaper.

%&latex
%!TEX TS-program = latex
\documentclass[dvips]{article}
\usepackage[margin={0pt,0pt}]{geometry}
\usepackage{pstricks}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\begin{document}
\psset{unit=1in}%
\begin{pspicture}(0,0)(8.5,11)
\rput[bl](0,0){Bottom left}%
\rput[tr](8.5,11){Top right}%
\psline(0,10)(8.5,10)
\end{pspicture}%
\end{document}

Michael



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