Raster sizes: paper trays

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.

A group of procedures (formerly operators) in statusdict are intended to select a paper tray explicitly containing the paper size described. These procedures are:

lettertray, legaltray, 11x17tray, ledgertray, a2tray, a3tray, a4tray, a5tray, b5tray, broadsheettray, tabloidtray, 12x24tray, 15x24tray

The size implied by each is the same as that for the corresponding userdict procedure listed in the table in Raster sizes: sheet sizes.

If the paper tray of the appropriate size is not present, a rangecheck error is supposed to occur. However, experience has shown that jobs which contain references to these procedures are regularly provided to the RIP whether or not they are to be RIPped in an environment where there is likely to be a paper tray of any kind. Nevertheless, the job would need to be output on film, or whatever. Therefore, GGS has never implemented the rangecheck error in the same way as Adobe, and the Level 2 procedures are simply copies of the corresponding paper size operators in userdict.

In Level 2 implementations, Adobe has translated these operators into calls to setpagedevice which use the PolicyReport procedure on PageSize to determine whether or not an exact match was made on the requested paper size and produce the rangecheck error if not. The same behavior can be achieved in the RIP by redefining a tray procedure to pass an appropriate policyreport procedure to genericpaper (described in Raster sizes: sheet sizes).

For example a4tray could be redefined as:

            statusdict /a4tray { [ 595.28 841.89 ] 1
            { pop /a4tray /rangecheck .error }
            //statusdict /genericpaper get exec
            } put

However, think carefully before doing this. In the kind of environment where there is a printer with a paper tray, users often do not see error messages, and so become frustrated because their jobs appear to vanish. Usually they would rather have the job printed on the wrong size paper, and Level 2 provides for selecting the nearest paper size if an exact match is not possible. In particular a4 and letter are rarely so incompatible that any marks are lost from the page, though the positioning of the page contents would be wrong.