Help with Rudi's manuals

[Greg]

I have my cub up and running thanks to all on this board. I put a Woods (C4 I believe) mower on it this weekend- an old cobbled together one. I found manuals on Rudi's site, but whenever I print a get portion of the page cut off. Any tricks to this?

[beaconlight]

Greg I found that when I attempt to print when I use the HMTL version I have the same trouble. I have been told that if I import it into MS Word or any other word processing program I can add page breaks and it will print ok. I have not tried that yet.
What I have done is load each page in the JPG format and print each page individually. I find that they are too small so I go into properties and print at any where from 120% to 200% till it fits my paper.
Bill

[allenlook]

I had major issues! Any printer driver with margins (or a printable area) that was greater than zero would result in cutoffs at the bottom.

I finally ended up using the "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" printer driver that comes with Microsoft Office 2003.

I set the margins to ZERO on all sides and they printed out just fine, except they had a blank page between all the pages, so I used Microsoft Office Document Imaging to delete every other page, then OCRed them, and now they're fine (and text searchable.)

I saved the documents in MDI format, which is much smaller than the original TIFF or PDF, without any loss in quality.

Keep your eyes peeled, you may see them coming to a server near you

[parts man]

OK, Allen, one thing to remember, you are talking to the guy who searched his key-board for the "any" key too, eh.

[allenlook]

Well, my explanation wasn't that good - sorry! I tried to rewrite it a few times, but it was kind of hard to describe what I had to do...

I'll try again - each printer you use in Windows has a "driver", which you install (or Windows usually installs automatically with the "Plug and Pray" feature) when you connect and configure the printer for the first time.

But, the cool thing is, you can also get "drivers" that LOOK and ACT like printers but that don't actually send your document to a device that puts your words to paper!

The old Windows 3.1 (back in the early 90's) had a driver like this called Generic/Text. The driver was a really simplistic one that would print to just about any printer because it didn't put any special "control codes" in the data stream. But it also had a little check box called "Print to File" that would save your document as a text file instead of sending it to the printer.

Now, with all of these document formats floating around out there, like TIFF (the format of most faxes), and PDF, and MDI, and, and, and - people are having more and more difficulty getting documents in a format that they can read.

So to help people out (and save them from having to buy expensive conversion software), the vendors have started releasing printer drivers that actually just convert the files you choose into a new format, instead of sending it to your printer.

For instance, if you download/install the free printer driver from PDF995, you will have a "virtual printer" on your computer of the same name. Then if you open ANY application on your computer and print a document to this "printer", it will actually create a file in PDF format (prompting you for the name and location of the file in the process.)

Likewise, there are plenty of drivers that will save your document in TIFF format, or that will actually FAX your document instead of printing it, etc...

The driver I used comes with MS Office 2003, and it converts documents into TIFF or MDI format (a variant of TIFF). TIFF stands for Tagged Image Format File (or something like that), and is one of the only graphics formats that allow multiple pages in one file.

I hope that's a better explanation than the first one.

[Rudi]

Alan:

That was an excellent explanation.

[parts man]

Thanks Allen, appreciate the "dumbing it down' !

[allenlook]

You're very welcome.

And of course, if you need a document converted, just send it on over and I'll do my best to oblige.

I'm a BigDog wannabe, but I gotta start small by collecting files first, then I have to work my way up to tools, then parts, then implements, and finally to full-fledged Cub Collection.

At least that's what it says in the Cub Collection Handbook... Darn thing cost me $35... But BigDog assured me the proceeds go to an honorable cause, something about The Home for Wayward Cubs?

[Rudi]

Allen:

Sure could use a hand over the winter months bringin the server up to snuff!

Be nice to get it all nice and workin right with various formats to suit the connection speed!

[allenlook]

If you like, I can replicate the entire website to my local PC and then work on it here and publish the updates as necessary.

Probably wouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so...