Paper and Layout Properties - PDF

The Main tab on the Print Styles dialog is used to specify paper and layout properties for PDF print definitions.

The Main tab contains radio buttons, check boxes, and drop-down list boxes to define print definition properties. The first item in each list box is an empty list item. If a list box is set to the empty list item, it does not set the print definition property.

The check box has three states:

Checked indicates that you want the item set.
Unchecked indicates that you do not want the item set.
Shaded indicates that no setting is to be applied to the item.

Specifying Paper Properties

Using the Paper controls on the Main tab, you can change the paper size and paper source of the printed output. You can also specify whether or not you want to use the full limits of the paper.

The Do not set option indicates that the setting not be changed for the prints.

The Choose best fit paper size control maps the PDF page size to the closest form size on the target printer. For example, suppose the PDF paper size is B-size and you are printing to a small-format laser printer that only contains an A-size form. In this case, the software will reduce the PDF paper size to fit the printable area on the A-size form. If you submit the same PDF paper size (B-size sheet) to a large format printer that can print both C-size and D-size sheets, the software will print the B-size sheet to the closet form size (C-size), but it will not enlarge the image.

Note: When Choose best fit paper size is selected, larger PDF paper sizes will automatically be reduced to the smaller paper size regardless of the Shrink oversize pages setting.

You can choose Select to select a specific paper size for each page in a PDF document. This allows you to print each page in the document with the same paper size.

The Paper source control uses the PDF page size to determine the output tray. This control is useful for printing PDF documents that contain multiple page sizes.

Specifying PDF Layout Properties

The Layout controls on the Main tab let you specify properties such as shrink oversize pages and centering the print.

Using the Shrink Oversize Pages control, you can shrink large pages down in order to fit the active paper size for the selected printer.

Note: Small pages are never enlarged to fit the active paper size.

Use the Center control to make sure pages in the PDF document are centered on the paper size.

The Print PDF comments control lets you print PDF comments (annotations and markups).

Note: This control does not apply when printing to PDF using pdf.pltcfg. Unless other property settings force the PDF to be rasterized, the input PDF is simply copied as-is to the output PDF. Control over PDF comments is deferred until the output PDF is printed.

PDF documents are printed in one of two ways: rasterized and non-rasterized.

The non-rasterized case can also be thought of as pass-thru. Pass-thru only occurs when printing using pdf.pltcfg, and the PDF print definition has Choose best fit paper size enabled. In that case, the source PDF is inserted as-is into the output PDF, and settings such as Center and Shrink have no effect.

For rasterized PDF printing, the source PDF is rendered into an RGB image whose dimensions are calculated based on the media and crop rectangles of the source PDF, the destination form size, and the Shrink setting. The aspect ratio of the potentially rescaled media/crop rectangle may not match that of the destination form. In that event, the Center setting is used to determine whether or not the rasterized image is centered in the form.