[pdftex] hoffsets, voffset and better solutions

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Dennis van Dok <d.vandok at ecn.nl> writes on Wed, 7 Mar 2001 17:20:55 +0100

>> I'm making documents with folding lines, which should divide the paper in
>> three equal parts. ...
>> different printers have different characteristics and some of
>> them print with a considerable offset.

Indeed. That is a common problem: even printers from the same vendor
model line may have slightly different (perhaps as much as 5mm)
notions of where (0,0) is in the page coordinate system.  For that
reason, my dvialw has a configuration option to fiddle the origin for
a particular printer.

Because of this printer-specific variation, I see no way to deal with
it cleanly at the PostScript or PDF level.

Ideally, printers should have a calibration mechanism to adjust the
(0,0) point; however, I don't recall ever seeing any laser printer
with such an adjustment.

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