Printing Page Rotation Parameter

Q. I have several HP 4000s and 8000s attached via LAN (3812, Mod 1, *IP attached CRTDEVPRT devices), and they all work well except for one small problem. The output produced by a 132-column spool file is similar to 8-point Courier New, and the page (printed in landscape) has a two-inch border at the bottom and right of the output. I've adjusted most of the font settings on both our AS/400 and printer, but doing so didn't help. What can I do?

A. I'm guessing the font is probably about 17 characters per inch (cpi) or so. The problem is with the page rotation parameter (PAGRTT), which by default is set at *COR. This causes the AS/400 to instruct the printer to print smaller with a large margin to ensure everything will print on the page. You need to change the PAGRTT parameter to 0 for portrait printing and 90 for landscape, and then change the LPI and CPI parameters. For example, 132 characters will easily fit within 11 inches using 13.3 cpi and 8 lines per inch (lpi). A 15 cpi setting will print about 160 characters, but with a smaller font. Each printer has an unprintable margin, but with the newest printers this margin is quite small. With 8 lpi you should be able to print 64 to 66 lines, so you may want to adjust your page length and overflow to get the most out of your pages. I set my page size to 65 with 64 as the overflow.

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