PUB: Printing Banners on Continuous Fan-Fold Paper

When printing a banner from Publisher or Creative Writer to a tractor-feed printer that prints on continuous fan-fold paper, you may get unwanted gaps (margins) between pages. This occurs even if you set the Tile overlap in Publisher to 0 (zero).

Many dot-matrix printer drivers enforce a minimum margin at the top and bottom of each page. This default margin produces a gap in the banner even if the Tile overlap is set to 0. Some printer drivers allow you to control the margin in the Windows Control Panel. Check the Control Panel or call your printer manufacturer to determine whether you can control the margin.

Recent upgrades to some of the drivers for the Epson LQ and FX family of printers and the IBM ProPrinter X24 and XL24 allow you to set top and bottom margins to 0. This enables you to print banners on Panasonic printers and many other dot-matrix printers that can emulate an Epson printer (with some exceptions).

The drivers that support this feature include the following:

• EPSON24.DRV
• EPSON9.DRV
• PROPRN24.DRV.

To see whether your driver supports this feature, use the following procedure to check whether or not your printer options include a Margin option.

Windows 95

1. Using the right mouse button, click the printer icon and click Properties
2. In the Properties dialog box, click the Paper tab.
3. Look for an Unprintable Regions button (some drivers use a different name).

If the printer setup dialog box includes a Margins button or setting, you should be able to set your margins to zero.

Windows 3.x

1. In the Windows Program Manager, click the Windows Control Panel.
2. In the Control Panel, click Printers.
3. Select the Epson printer and click Setup.
4. On the next screen click Options.
5. Look for a Margins command button or setting.

Panasonic technical support has confirmed that Panasonic dot-matrix drivers such as the KX-P2123 force a minimum margin at the top and bottom of each page and that there is no way to suppress that margin.

If you have been able to print to the edge of the page from your printer before, there are three possible reasons why it worked:

1. You were printing from MS-DOS using an MS-DOS printer driver, which is different from the Windows driver used by Publisher.
2. You were printing from a Windows-based application that has special code to cancel the forced margin. Some graphics programs have such a feature.
3. You were using a driver that allowed you to set margins to 0.