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Author Topic: Printer Driver Help  (Read 3147 times)

m_s

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Printer Driver Help
« on: May 08, 2006, 03:58 AM »
I have an old HP Deskjet 880c, which is a pretty good printer, and when I bought it years back was quite expensive.  I probably should update now, but most of the time it runs pretty well.  I've just started writing over at http://www.diyplanner.com, and my first project is to make myself a Hipster PDA and report on my experience of using it.  When I tried this last year, the printer ate my index cards and I gave up.  But last night I decided to give it another go, and the printer worked fine printing onto the cards.  Hooray!  Except: I can see no way of setting a custom paper size under XP, which means that what was printed was off-centre, off-scale, and unusable.  When I used the printer under WinME, it did have this option; but, as it says on the HP support site, XP comes with a basic driver for this printer built-in.  That's just the problem: it's a basic driver, with a number of preset paper sizes, but as far as I can see, no way to print onto 3x5 index cards or any other custom paper size.  Please prove me wrong...  Or teahc me how to override XP's helpfulness and install an older driver - if I try that now, it just says something along the lines of 'This driver is incompatible.' 

As I've written this, I have remembered that I still have my old Toshiba WinME laptop somewhere downstairs, so I can probably just print from that, but it would be much better to be able to do this on my main machine.

Carol Haynes

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Re: Printer Driver Help
« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2006, 05:39 AM »
If you have MS Word you could always create a label template to ensure alignment

m_s

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Re: Printer Driver Help
« Reply #2 on: May 08, 2006, 06:55 AM »
Good tip, Carol.  It worked well; using the Graphics version of the hPDA templates, I was able to set up a Word document for everything, and just stretch and squeeze where I needed to work with the printer's margins.  Hooray!