System printer preview entire page

When a system printer driver is selected in the Print dialog, you now have the option to view the non-printable and non-usable areas in the preview window. To see these margins, check the “Show entire page in preview” toggle button in the Preview section of the Print dialog box.

This control is visible only when the selected printer driver is a system printer driver that is not in fullsheet mode. That is, the default printer.plt. Bentley printer drivers (such as hpgl2.plt and pscript.plt) do not contain printable area information in the driver file. If /fullsheet is specified for a system printer driver, the page rectangle always represents the physical paper size and the non-printable area is always depicted inside it. Therefore, the "show entire page" toggle does not apply for these two cases.

When the “show entire page” toggle is not checked, the page rectangle represents the current usable area.

When the entire page is depicted, up to two interior margin rectangles may be drawn inside the physical paper rectangle — the printable area rectangle (in light gray) and the usable area rectangle (in red). The presence of the margin rectangles and their colors are configurable.

The printable area rectangle is an attribute of the printer driver and cannot be changed in MicroStation. Its dimensions depend on the selected paper size name. No output can be printed outside this rectangle. The printable area rectangle is drawn only if it is different from the usable area.

The usable area rectangle indicates the effective non-printable area. It may contain regions that you can change from within MicroStation. The usable area consists of the physical paper size minus the driver's non-printable area minus any user-defined Windows page setup margins minus any form offset specified in the printer driver (.plt) file.

The figure below shows an entire page preview. The printer driver's non-printable area is drawn with a dashed light gray rectangle. The printer driver (.plt) file sysprinter record contains an offset reserved for the plot label. This offset is represented by the dashed red usable area rectangle.

The print preview line colors may be altered via the following configuration variables. Valid color numbers are: blue = 1, red = 4, magenta = 5, light-gray = 8, medium-gray = 10, turquoise = 13, dark-green = 14, maroon = 15, dark-yellow = 17.

MS_PLT_PREVIEW_USABLEAREACOLOR — specifies the color of the usable area rectangle in the preview window. If zero, the rectangle is not drawn.

MS_PLT_PREVIEW_PRINTABLEAREACOLOR — specifies the color of the printer driver's printable area rectangle in the preview window. If zero, the rectangle is not drawn.

MS_PLT_PREVIEW_PLOTBOXCOLOR — specifies the color of the print bounding box rectangle in the preview window. If zero, the rectangle is not drawn.

MS_PLT_PREVIEW_PLOTFENCECOLOR — specifies the color of the print fence shape in the preview window. If zero, the shape is not drawn.