Avery 8167 label printing

users
#21

<snip>

PDF is a great way to exchange documents but it has an interesting print
option (usually) of shrinking to fit the printer margins. If you send a
PDF label set, you need to remind the recipient to print them full size.
I've run into this problem several times where my carefully crafted PDFs
aren't printed the way I designed them.

In this case, IMO, the creator of the PDF should be aware of the potential margin issue and set them accordingly. So far, I've never been burned that I know of by using .5" margins except with the top margin of the 8167 labels.

So there should be no need for shrink to fit unless we are talking a totally different page size.

But it's awful hard to break people's mindset and get them to switch to PDF. "Oh, if we are going to share and work with the same thing, we both have to have MS Word." Or WordPerfect. Or Lotus' word processor in the old days, I can't remember the name. At one time, this was absolutely true. But it's no longer a mandatory thing with PDF on the scene.

There will be situations where where Word, or Excel, or ??? will be required. But it's because that software is already in use across the enterprise. It's not because it's the only software that will do the job.

That's not the issue. Sometimes you want something to occupy the full page for professional printing but people use their home printers instead.

As for using the same software, that doesn't solve problems if the person doesn't have the same fonts installed that you do. The PDF format removes the requirement to stick to common fonts.

Similarly the ISO standard Open Document formats that LibreOffice uses allow documents to used by other programs, including the M$ ones. They may not look the same, but will at least be exchangeable and editable.

There used to be a problem with multi-column labels but they seem to
have redone the label specification to correct that. When creating
labels, there is "Format" tab that lets you adjust the label
properties.
In its new incarnation, it is easy to use and gives you exactly
what you
need to adjust the properties of incorrectly specified common label
formats down to 1/100 of an inch.

In the end, I'll probably do this.

You can specify the top margin, label height and vertical pitch (the
last two may be different if there is space between the labels) and do
the same for the left margin, label width and horizontal pitch. They
also allow you to specify the page size and the number of rows and
columns.

If you think a label isn't defined correctly, fix it. Also, file a bug
report so that the developers can fix it for everyone. It's better to
light a candle or two than to curse the darkness.

In this case, the label spec is correct. Font design will have to
have a factor in this someway too, I suspect.

It shouldn't unless LO calculates the position of the next label
relative to the end of the previous text. It would seem more natural
(and simpler) to calculate in absolute terms.

Upon retrospect, I agree. But it is something you have to be
cognizant of when designing the label, as it can affect the apparent
vertical centering of text on the label. Which can effect what you
think may be happening with label output. In my case, the label
includes a graphic, which is unaffected by text positioning. Makes it
easy to figure out where the problem is likely to be.

Another overall negative effect of this problem is, you have to ask
yourself, if this is broken, what else in the suite is broken?
Especially if you are using LO to make a living. Is there another
feature I use in Writer that doesn't work correctly? What if one or
two functions in the spreadsheet calculate incorrectly? What if Base
occasionally mangles your data?

I remember years ago when Intel turned out a chip that had an error in
it's math calculations. It was a rare happening, but when they
finally admitted it publicly, trying to say it wasn't important do to
the rare occurrence, it did not go over well at all! <G>

I've yet to find software that is perfect (except of course for what I
develop :wink: ). Big suites like LO will have the occasional bug but
I've never found one that was more than an annoyance.

It's an annoyance if you can find a workaround. It's a problem if there's no workaround, and it's something you need to get your job done.

And, if it was something I produced, I won't be happy until it's fixed. "Close enough" just doesn't work for me in a lot of cases.

You did find a workaround though. As for perfection, the universe wouldn't exist if there was such a thing.

#22

And there is the distinction between precision and accuracy. You can be very precisely inaccurate.
Steve

#23

About 25 years ago, I was the treasurer of my children's preschool. I created a spreadsheet to calculate paychecks, and I found that the paycheck was consistently off by .01 (a penny). It drove me nuts. As it turned out, one part of the calculation required the division of 28 by 7, which every third grader knows is 4. Well, my spreadsheet gave an answer of 3.9999999999_. By itself, it wasn't a big problem, but later in the chain of operations, the 3.99999_ produced a result that rounded *down* to the nearest penny instead of *up*, which it would have done if the 28/7 had resulted in 4 instead of 3.9999. I complained to a computer friend of mine who tried to explain that the computer's answer was more "precise" than my mental math of 28/7=4. I didn't buy it. I learned a valuable lesson in blindly accepting a computer's calculation simply because it was made by a computer.

I strongly suspect that you didn't, in fact, try to divide 28 by 4 - which your spreadsheet would have got right!

Currency amounts are often expressed in whole pounds or dollars or whatever, with pence or cents as a fraction of the basic currency unit. But these fractions are deceptive: you simply don't want them to be handled the way they are stated. If, for example, you have the value $1.23 and halve it, you don't want the result to be $0.615. The amounts may look like what programmers call "real" or "floating-point" values, but they are actually *integer* values: that $1.23 is better thought of as 123 cents - with no fractional part present.

Spreadsheet values are always real rather than integer, so you have to take care with how you calculate with them. If you halve $1.23 (properly formatted as Currency) in a spreadsheet, the result will be helpfully rounded in the display to $0.62. But the underlying value will still be the correct result of 0.615. You need to be alert to this situation in order to use spreadsheets successfully. You have a number of options, and your choice may depend on circumstances:
o You may decide to retain the underlying value (although the displayed value will still be rounded).
o You may round or truncate the value explicitly in your formula.
o You may choose to tick the option at Tools | Options... | LibreOffice Calc | Calculate | Precision as shown.

Depending on your choice, doubling the displayed value of $0.62 may produce $1.23 or $1.24. Both of these results may be helpful in different circumstances. It is perfectly possible to carry out accounting calculations in a spreadsheet providing they are done sensitively.

So what was happening in your case? Well, my guess is that the value you were dividing by 4 was not the integer 28 but instead some currency amount ending in 28 cents. If you express this conventionally as $X.28, you are calculating with a floating-point value having a fractional part of 0.28. Now although this fraction terminates after two decimal digits, it is a recurring binary fraction: 0.01000111101011100001... - with those twenty fractional binary digits recurring indefinitely. It can only be that this value is either truncated or rounded in a cell value. So if you choose to use a spreadsheet conventionally - and here's the important point - an amount of $X.28 is *already* stored only approximately. This is the genuine source of your problem - not any subsequent division by 4.

What I found interesting was that, in the spreadsheet, I got the "wrong" 3.9999, but I wrote a simple BASIC program on my beloved Tandy Model 100 and got the "correct" answer of 4. I was excited to see that my little first generation laptop gave better results than my state of the art (for the time) PC.

Well, we cannot know how you programmed this, but in Basic you may have been forced either to use integer values - in which case you would have represented $1.28 as 128 in cents, avoiding the problem - or else to attend to the rounding explicitly. However you did this, you were probably alert to the very problem of which you needed to be aware in the spreadsheet version. The difference will not have been because your simpler hardware was somehow better at doing elementary arithmetic than your flashy new PC.

I wouldn't buy it either. I don't care how someone tries to explain it, the result is wrong. Pure and simple. Just try pulling that response on a grade school teacher, and you're going home with an "F". How something can be more "precise" than the correct answer is beyond me. Wrong is wrong, I don't care how somebody wishes to justify it.

Sadly, all this attitude achieves is that you are never going to be able to understand what is happening or to use spreadsheets reliably. That is unfortunate, of course.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#24

I guess you've never studied Calculus, where the answer often
approaches, but never actually reaches some value. You can get closer
and closer, but never actually get that value. :wink:

#25

Thanks for the tip, but back in 1989 when this was all happening, I'm not sure that my DOS spreadsheet even had the ability to display numbers as "currency". I certainly made no attempt to do so, even if it were possible. They were just numbers and, yes, integers, and no, the spreadsheet didn't get 28 divided by 7 correct.

I have learned, however, as you point out, that how numbers are displayed is not the same as what they are. For example, you can't "round" a number in a spreadsheet by simply reducing the number of decimal places displayed in a cell. The underlying number remains unrounded and further calculations with it might produce undesired results. When working with currency, I've developed the habit of probably overusing the the "@round" function at each step of a complex calculation just to ensure desired results.

Virgil

#26

There were stories back in the 1970s about programmers taking advantage of the binary/floating point rounding errors to transfer a penny here and there into their own accounts. With huge numbers of transactions each day, the pennies added up very quickly.

COBOL actually had features that let you do arithmetic in decimal digits with the decimal point being a display item, not an actual fractional part of a number, so that the results would be exactly what they were if you did the calculations by hand.

#27

Recall the old joke about a man and woman approaching each other
asymptotically. The mathematician says they never meet. The engineer says
that they get close enough for all practical purposes.

#28

Sounds like life.
A bit off topic One of the things I did like about calculus is that it models so much of what changes about us. A real eye opener, when I first started applying it to real life situations it was a bit like seeing all that code in the matrix (some years before the matrix, cell phones and PCs).

#29

Perhaps the BASIC code was only displaying the number to a few decimal places. In C, printf defaults to 6 decimal places, which isn't enough to show the actual result as any different from the ideal result.

It's also possible that the spreadsheet was doing something more complicated internally than just 28*(1/7). Playing around with an example in C, I can see the error in representing (1/7), but multiplying that by 28 gives exactly 4:
                 Decimal In-memory
         (1/7) = 0.142857149243354797363281250000 0x3e124925
      28*(1/7) = 4.000000000000000000000000000000 0x40800000

On the other hand, storing 1/490 in a float, then storing the result of multiplying that by 70 (should be the same as 1/7), then storing the result of multiplying that by 28, gives 3.99999976...:
                 Decimal In-memory
       (1/490) = 0.002040816238150000572204589844 0x3b05bf37
    70*(1/490) = 0.142857134342193603515625000000 0x3e124924
28*70*(1/490) = 3.999999761581420898437500000000 0x407fffff

I'm not suggesting that's exactly what the spreadsheet was doing, but it shows that slight changes to the detail of the calculation (which wouldn't affect the result with unlimited precision) can have an effect on whether the result is equal to or slightly more or less than the expected result.

Mark.

Virgil Arrington wrote:

#30

<snip>

PDF is a great way to exchange documents but it has an interesting print
option (usually) of shrinking to fit the printer margins. If you send a
PDF label set, you need to remind the recipient to print them full size.
I've run into this problem several times where my carefully crafted PDFs
aren't printed the way I designed them.

In this case, IMO, the creator of the PDF should be aware of the
potential margin issue and set them accordingly. So far, I've never
been burned that I know of by using .5" margins except with the top
margin of the 8167 labels.

So there should be no need for shrink to fit unless we are talking a
totally different page size.

But it's awful hard to break people's mindset and get them to switch
to PDF. "Oh, if we are going to share and work with the same thing,
we both have to have MS Word." Or WordPerfect. Or Lotus' word
processor in the old days, I can't remember the name. At one time,
this was absolutely true. But it's no longer a mandatory thing with
PDF on the scene.

There will be situations where where Word, or Excel, or ??? will
be required. But it's because that software is already in use across
the enterprise. It's not because it's the only software that will do
the job.

That's not the issue. Sometimes you want something to occupy the full
page for professional printing but people use their home printers instead.

Agreed, you need the bleed area. But in this case of labels off the shelf, using a software's built in template that is correct when measured with a ruler, telling the software to shrink to fit shouldn't have any effect.

I just did a business card design that needed a bleed area. Actually came out with the right colors! LOL

As for using the same software, that doesn't solve problems if the
person doesn't have the same fonts installed that you do. The PDF format
removes the requirement to stick to common fonts.

Similarly the ISO standard Open Document formats that LibreOffice uses
allow documents to used by other programs, including the M$ ones. They
may not look the same, but will at least be exchangeable and editable.

There used to be a problem with multi-column labels but they seem to
have redone the label specification to correct that. When creating
labels, there is "Format" tab that lets you adjust the label
properties.
In its new incarnation, it is easy to use and gives you exactly
what you
need to adjust the properties of incorrectly specified common label
formats down to 1/100 of an inch.

In the end, I'll probably do this.

You can specify the top margin, label height and vertical pitch (the
last two may be different if there is space between the labels)
and do
the same for the left margin, label width and horizontal pitch. They
also allow you to specify the page size and the number of rows and
columns.

If you think a label isn't defined correctly, fix it. Also, file
a bug
report so that the developers can fix it for everyone. It's
better to
light a candle or two than to curse the darkness.

In this case, the label spec is correct. Font design will have to
have a factor in this someway too, I suspect.

It shouldn't unless LO calculates the position of the next label
relative to the end of the previous text. It would seem more natural
(and simpler) to calculate in absolute terms.

Upon retrospect, I agree. But it is something you have to be
cognizant of when designing the label, as it can affect the apparent
vertical centering of text on the label. Which can effect what you
think may be happening with label output. In my case, the label
includes a graphic, which is unaffected by text positioning. Makes it
easy to figure out where the problem is likely to be.

Another overall negative effect of this problem is, you have to ask
yourself, if this is broken, what else in the suite is broken?
Especially if you are using LO to make a living. Is there another
feature I use in Writer that doesn't work correctly? What if one or
two functions in the spreadsheet calculate incorrectly? What if Base
occasionally mangles your data?

I remember years ago when Intel turned out a chip that had an error in
it's math calculations. It was a rare happening, but when they
finally admitted it publicly, trying to say it wasn't important do to
the rare occurrence, it did not go over well at all! <G>

I've yet to find software that is perfect (except of course for what I
develop :wink: ). Big suites like LO will have the occasional bug but
I've never found one that was more than an annoyance.

It's an annoyance if you can find a workaround. It's a problem if
there's no workaround, and it's something you need to get your job done.

And, if it was something I produced, I won't be happy until it's
fixed. "Close enough" just doesn't work for me in a lot of cases.

You did find a workaround though. As for perfection, the universe
wouldn't exist if there was such a thing.

Unfortunately, the work around only works for me. If this was something that needed to be sent to someone else, the workaround is probably useless.

#31

Ken Springer wrote:

Ken Springer wrote:

Slippage in the rollers is what I was thinking of.

In my case, the error is consistent, so slippage is not problem.

Telling the printer where to actually start the printing appears to be
the issue. We'll call it the top margin for convenience, but even that
has it's own issues. Since the driver is TWAIN, the brand of printer
shouldn't make a difference as long as the printer manufacturer doesn't
screw up the driver.

Time to "expand our horizons". (Sounds like a motivational speaker,
doesn't it? LOL)

LO's built-in template, displayed on the screen, is correct. The
paper's top margin is .5" on the screen and in real life. Positioning
of the text is also correct, as displayed on the screen.

Only printing is in error.

Now... Suppose you are creating X number of label designs for someone
else. They don't have LO, how to you get the labels to them? Today, I
think almost everyone's answer would be PDF.

You may already realise, but in case not... Adobe Reader has an option
to "Shrink oversized pages" when printing.

Every PDF reader I've toyed with has that option for scaling. Useful
if you receive something that was created for 11 X 17 paper, and all you
have is 8.5 X11. In which case, I would expect a bit of error, not to
mention difficulty in reading text that may be on the page.

You might not expect that to
do anything when printing an A4 PDF printing onto A4 paper, but it
actually shrinks the page slightly to allow for the non-printable
margins around the page. To get a 1:1 scale print you have to select
"Actual size". It remembers the last setting you use, so you have to
remember to check what's it's set to each time.

I would submit, that the person who created the PDF, should have
considered non-printable margins. Which is why I always use margins
that I'm sure all printers can handle, at least to the best of my
knowledge.

I'd agree with that. Pretty much all PDFs I've seen do have a margin between the content and the edge of the page, and can be printed at actual size without problem. It's useful, as you say, if you need to print an 11x17 document on 8.5x11 paper (or in my case usually A3 on A4), but rather annoying when it's then set by default next time and shrinks an 8.5x11 (or A4) document slightly. I think it's the default on a fresh install of Adobe Reader so some people might not even notice it.

Fair enough, but that doesn't work either. If you create the PDF with
the default template settings, which are correct, the resulting PDF file
is also in error. I tried it. Same vertical offset issue.

Is the vertical offset incorrect on screen as well as when printed? When
I first read that, I thought you meant it was wrong on-screen as well,
but from your discussion below it sounds like the PDF is displayed with
the correct margin, but prints with the wrong margin?

If the onscreen display of the margins for 8167 labels is correct, the
printed output is incorrect, from both LO and PDF. If the onscreen
margins are incorrect (to the needed amount of course), the printed
output is correct, from both LO and PDF.

So you change the top margin, create the PDF, and yep, labels print
correctly.

What's wrong with this?

In the above scenario, the recipient of the PDF may/can/will look at the
labels before printing them, to see if they are correct. (If they
don't, they aren't doing their job.) Guess what? They'll see the top
margin error, more easily spotted if you have a vertical ruler option.
If you send a PDF based on the correct template (the one supplied by
LO), the printing will be off. If you send a PDF based on a modified
template, the visual display on the screen will be off.

So if you have a PDF which displays on screen with the correct margin,
but when printed it has the wrong margin?

Yep. <G>

To get it to print with the
correct margin, you have to produce a PDF which displays with an
incorrect margin?

Yep.

< Assuming you're printing the PDF at actual size, that

would suggest the printer or its driver is in error (unless your PDF
reader has the same issue as LibreOffice). Once LibreOffice has created
a PDF, it has nothing to do with any difference between how the PDF
reader displays and prints it.

Unless the error is embedded in the PDF. :slight_smile:

I'm not sure that there's anything in the PDF format to specify different margins for display and printing, but I may be wrong. It's intended as a page layout format, specifying the position of each item so that it's displayed and printed consistently between systems. As I understand it, PDF doesn't even have a concept of paragraphs - they're just separate lines which happen to be positioned one below another.

I hadn't considered the printer driver to be the problem, since the
other size label does not exhibit this issue. A .5" margin is a .5"
margin. :slight_smile:

That is odd... Do both templates have a 0.5" margin? If you put the same line of text into the first label of both templates, does it appear the same distance from the top of the page in both cases (when viewed on screen)? Or does that line appear slightly lower in one than the other (perhaps because there's an additional margin between the top of label and its content)?

Do both templates have the same horizontal margins? Perhaps something (maybe the printer driver) is scaling to fit the horizontal width within the printable area of the page; some sheets of labels go quite close to the edges.

It may be worth looking through all the options offered by your printer, in case there's anything there related to scaling, fit-to-page, scaling A4 to fit on letter paper (or letter on A4), etc. I'm not sure if it's the same on Mac, but on Windows LibreOffice those options can be found at File > Print > (Select printer) > Properties. If there's an option for borderless printing, it might be worth trying that too.

If you open a PDF created from a completely different application, does
that also print with different margins than when displayed on-screen?

Yep. Just tried Word 2011 on this Mac, same printing error. Margin on
the screen is correct, printed margin is not. Which does point to the
printer driver as the possible source of the problem.

It may be worth looking on the printer manufacturer's website to see if an updated driver is available.

OT, but I noticed that the 0 point on the vertical ruler in Office is at
the top margin, not the top of the paper. Resulting in the ruler saying
the letter sized paper being 10.5" long. LOL

It probably makes sense for the horizontal ruler to start at the margin, since you're more likely to want to specify indents etc. relative to the edge of the text rather than the page (the distinction is more important if odd and even pages have different margins). I guess the vertical ruler is just consistent with that. To be honest, I don't think I use the vertical ruler much.

Can you try printing your LibreOffice document and/or PDF on a different
printer? Rather than wasting labels, you could of course print on plain
paper and hold it up against the labels ;o)

Wish I could, but my inkjet does not want to feed paper. I suspect the
rubber feed roller has hardened on the surface and no longer grabs the
paper. I used it so little, it's way down on the priority list to fix.

No problem, it was just another idea to narrow down the problem. Having tried a different application with the same printer helps there.