Hi, Stuart. Don't worry about being woolly... I'm so tired, I'm up
for anything. V1 (more correctly, V0.2) of the document went to the
client today, and I hand-assembled it rather than delay.
I might have been a bit obscure about what I'm trying to do, but it's
fortunately really simple. I'm producing a technical document which
is a mix of descriptive prose - that is, bog-standard documentation -
and systems diagrams.
The prose is A4 portrait, and when that's double-sided on the long
edge you get a manual. The prose is interspersed with
diagrams/systems charts, and the diagrams are largely A3
landscape. When the document is assembled, the wide A3 pages are
fan-folded so that the bound document is still A4 portrait width when
it's at rest in a 3-ring binder.
If I were printing the A3 pages in isolation, the printer would be
told to duplex landscape/short-edge flipping, which would result in
footers at the bottom on both sides of the page.
The complication comes when the A4 and A3 sections are interspersed
in a single print run. Word is perfectly happy to let me insert a
section break and change both paper size and page orientation. The
printer is happy to print on the correct paper size
automagically. Whatever else I might think of the Brother inkjet,
it does do multiple sizes really well.
What doesn't work is that the reverse side of the A3 landscape page
is printed upside-down, because the flipping still happens on the
long edge - which is now the top/bottom of a landscape page. I need
the A3 pages to flip on the short edge so that the reverse side of
the page isn't printed upside down with respect to all the other pages.
The fact that Word is able to manage orientation and paper size from
within the document is encouraging, because that means Word is
communicating something to the printer driver. I figured it might
not be a major leap of faith to think that other attributes might be
set. But I'm becoming less hopeful that that's the case.
Once I've had a bit of sleep I'll try playing with page orientation,
but I don't think that will help keep the footers in the right
place. But it's an interesting idea, and I can always turn footers
off for reverse-side A3 pages.
John
At 14:24 13/07/2016, Stuart Burnfield wrote:
Hi John. I'm not 100% certain of how your printed document needs to look either, so the following is a bit woolly and speculative.
Do you mean that you want a mixture of page sizes where the shorter edge of the A3 pages lines up with the longer edge of the A4 pages? And therefore when printing each sheet double-sided, you want to tell the printer 'the binding edge for A4 pages is the longer edge but the binding edge for A3 pages is the shorter edge"?
If so, Suzy's suggestion to rotate the text on the A3 pages might work. Note that rotating the text on a page by 90 degrees is not the same as rotating the whole page by 90 degrees. For example, printing six A4 pages where pages 3 & 4 are landscape and the other four pages are portrait is, in effect, rotating the whole of pages 3 & 4 by 90 degrees. If there are page headers, they are rotated too.
Instead, you might print all six pages portrait but rotate the text on page 3/4 by 90 degrees. The pages all flip on the long edge and have the headers on the short edge except for pages 3/4, which have the header on the long edge.
Now what happens if pages 3/4 are A3? Can I assume you don't want to print anything on the back of the A3 sheet, so that only the A4 sheets are printed double-sided? So if just having a section break changing the orientation of the A3 insert doesn't give the right result, can you try keeping the same page orientation but selecting the text on the A3 page and changing the orientation of the selected text (Page Layout > Page Setup > Apply to: Selected text)?
I haven't tested this, and realistically it probably has to be done with your document and printer. But if this makes any sense I hope it gives you a new angle to experiment with.
Cheers,
--- Stuart
