Printer driver v6 always resets scaling to 100%

[M. England]

I have the latest PDF Exchange Editor v6.0.317.1. I loaded the PDF Exchange 6 lite print driver that comes with the editor, and I can print without issue.

But there is one function that does not work - setting the Scale of a print job.
If I select Print, and then select Print using system dialog, I have the "Preference button" One of the items on the preference page is "Scale", which (logically) defaults to 100%. I happen to have a web page that will fit on one sheet if it is printed at 90%. If I change the scale to 90% and print, I get a page that is still printed at 100% (and spills over to a single line on page 2)

You can see the problem without even printing. Go into preferences and changes the scale, OK the preference page. Immediately go into preferences again and the Scale setting has be reset to 100%. It appears any entry for scale is reset to 100%.

Printing at 90% scale (or any scale above or below 100%) worked in the PDF XChange 4.0 lite driver, it seems to have stopped working since then. I tried loading a copy of the old 4.0 driver I had, but I do not have a working serial number, so it prints with "Unlicensed Version" stamps on the page, so that does not appear to be a solution.

What I would really like is for the v6 driver to support the scale setting. What am I missing?

Michael

[Radi - Tracker Supp]

Hi Michael,

This is a known problem. Our developers are working on resolving it, but unfortunately we do not have an estimate release date for a fix yet.

Regards,
Radi

[M. England]

Is there any way to get a key for the v4 driver, so I can use that one instead? I still have the installer (v4.0.214.2 of PDF-XChange lite 4), This would be an easy workaround.

Michael

[Radi - Tracker Supp]

Hi Michael,

I've just tested some older builds of PDF-XChange Lite and it seems like this bug was not present in the one I tested (308.2) and also your license key should work with it.

Please try it and check if everything works as intended:
http://www.docu-track.co.uk/builds/5.5. ... 5SA_LE.zip

Regards,
Radi

[M. England]

Radi - Thanks for your help.

The license key worked fine with this 308.2 version. But...

To be safe, I uninstalled the v5 driver, and also uninstalled PDF-XChange completely.

I then re-loaded PDF-XChange, but did a custom install making the print driver unavailable (uninstalled). I rebooted , and then I loaded the 308.2 lite v5 driver (I used a different directory), and rebooted again.

The scale value preference does not get reset to 100% when you open and close the Preferences (yeah)

But the value is ignored when you print. It prints at 100% no matter what value you enter for Scale. Any scale you set is ignored and it prints at 100%.

Am I doing something incorrectly?

Michael

[Willy Van Nuffel]

I tested with the "PDF-XChange Lite V6" printer, and what I see is indeed when you change the "Scaling" via File > Print > Preferences > Paper, in the frame/zone "Graphic", it jumps back to 100%.

But, at the bottom of that same window, there is also "Scale" and check boxes for "Scale To Fit" and "Center".

So, when you un-check the "Scale To Fit" and you put "90.0" in the Scale-box, and eventually check/un-check the "Center" option, it does what it should do.

Does this help for you?

Best regards.

[M. England]

Willy, Very creative, but not a solution to my problem.

My pay stubs are delivered via the web. When you print them, just one line spills over to a second page. When I was using the v4 PDF Printer, I would set the scale to 90% and the whole thing would fit on one page.

With your solution, and I think I followed your directions correctly, I get page 1 scaled to 90%, and still have a one line spill-over to page 2, where this also is scaled at 90%. I still have 2 pages, just with smaller text.

Think of my document as a picture that is bigger than a page. If I were to scale it, I would want the entire picture smaller, so it fits on a single page. I don't want the same page breaks with smaller images on each of the pages.

I mentioned my pay stubs, but there are a number of other documents that PDF neatly to a smaller page count with just a little scaling. I want to be able to do this when I archive them.

There seems to be an easy solution -- can I get a license key that allows me to run the v4 printer and not have the"Unlicensed" stamps on each page. I'll gladly switch to v6 when the scale option works like it does in v4.

Michael

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hi M. England,

Thank you for the post. Before we generate a special serial key for you, could you please post a screenshot of your Lite (308) paper settings?

Thank you!

[M. England]

Patrick,

I have attached an image of the Preferences dialog with the Scaling as I believe Willy described. If I have anything set up incorrectly, please tell me what I should correct. v308:

https://goo.gl/photos/hokpyzdsdJNQ6Yms8

Since I have a system I use for testing, I loaded the PDF-XChange v4 lite driver (in a different directory). As noted, this does print the scaled page so there is no spill-over to page 2 - everything is on page 1 at 85% scale. The only problem is the "Unlicensed" stamps... v4:

https://goo.gl/photos/VQ5dHdkQS9BkYHfd6

(Just realize the original image links I used take you to the Google Image site, not the images directly, so the images did not display in-line in the message. I added the Google album URL just in case, and a new over-long image link that may work work -- and you have the Google Album URLs if the images do not display)
Thanks everyone for all your help!

Michael

[Radi - Tracker Supp]

Hi Michael,

It seems like you did not upload your screenshots. Please archive them before attaching them to your post. Thanks.

Regards,
Radi

[M. England]

Since the (rather long) image links don't work (thanks Google )

I just zipped them both and uploaded that file.

Michael

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hi M. England,

Thank you for posting those. Could you please also post a link to the web page you are trying to convert to PDF? It will be helpful in reproducing this issue and coming to quick resolution.

Thank you!

[M. England]

I cannot send you the web page I am printing, since, as I said earlier, it is my pay stub.

To demonstrate the problem, I have attached a .zip with 4 files. The sample file is the start of my checklist for loading a new PC. I open it in Wordpad, since MS Word is not loaded (as the PC is a fresh Win 10 install).

I clipped just the start of the file: "x360C test.rtf"

If you print it at 100% scale, it fills a bit more than a page. I did this using the v4 driver, the output is "x360C test100.pdf"

I then printed again with the v4 driver set to 70% scale. The output is: "x360C test70.pdf". Everything prints on one page.

I finally printed with the 308.2 (v5) driver, using the scale field at the bottom of the preference page as you suggested. The result is in: "x360C test70v5.pdf". As you can see, I still get 2 pages, with each page scaled to 70%.

This is just one example where the v4 driver works better.

There is a simple workaround to this problem -- use the v4 driver. Except I can't without a key. None of my old ones work any more. The driver is suppose to be a free part of my purchase of the editor. I just want to use the v4 driver, not v6.

Michael

[M. England]

It's been a more than a week and I have not heard back from anyone at Tracker Software.

On July 27th you said:
"Before we generate a special serial key for you, could you please post a screenshot of your Lite (308) paper settings?"

I posted those screen shots.

You then asked to see the web site I wanted to print at scale. I explained that the site in question contains my pay stub (which I obviously don't want to post). I did pass along a simple Word Pad document that shows the difference in behavior between the v4 PDF Printer Driver and the later versions.

I need the scaling behavior that is in the v4 driver,but I need a key so I can print without the "unregistered" stamps. I have purchased the PDF-XChange editor, which includes the XChange Lite printer driver. I simply want to run the old version of the driver and not the v6 driver that currently ships with the editor.

The old driver solves my problem. I'd really appreciate a key that allows me to run v4. How can we make this happen?

Michael

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi Michael,

Sincere apologies for the lack of response! I'll talk this over with the team tomorrow, as soon as we're all in, and will see what's going on.

Thanks for your patience!

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hello Michael,

Thank you for the post. Please send an email to sales@pdf-xchange.com with your current serial key and link back to this topic, and I will provide a special serial key for you to use with the V4 printer.

Cheers!

[Roman - Tracker Supp]

Hi Michael,

Recent PDF-XChange Lite printer uses another rendering engine that does not support paper scaling natively. Although we plan to implement this feature, it will not be present in the next release.
For now please consider using a precomputed (custom) paper size according to the required scaling ratio and (optionally) layout scaling options.

[Willy Van Nuffel]

Using a paper size that fits the content into one page, is a great idea of Roman to work around the problem.
That we had not thought earlier about that ...

In Microsoft WordPad, I opened Michael's RTF and then - via File > Page Setup - I set the paper size to A3.

Next - via File > Print > Print > PDF-XChange Lite V6 > Preferences > Paper, I set the Paper Size to Standard A3, and the Sheet Size to A4. The "Scale To Fit" option has to be active/checked. By this, the page size is automatically reduced to 70,7%

Next, I click OK and Print.

The result is attached to this post.

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hi Willy,

Glad to hear that the workaround suggested did it!

Cheers,
Stefan