HP 800, 700 manual Page Layout, Current Active Position CAP

The Page

6.2Page Layout

Referring to the previous figure, each page passed through the printer has a number of com- ponents. Text printing is normally limited to a specific printable area within the logical page known as the text area. The text area is entirely contained by the logical page, but may be smaller because of margins. There are unprintable regions along the outside edges and bot- tom of each sheet of print media. If printing is attempted outside the printable area at the bot- tom of the sheet, data may be printed on the following sheet. If printing is attempted in the unprintable regions, formatting or data may be lost.

The perforation skip zone extends from the bottom of the text area on one page to the top of the text area on the next page. When the Perforation Skip Mode is turned ON, a Line Feed that would normally move CAP into the bottom margin of the current page instead moves CAP to the top of the text area on the next page. If the Perforation Skip Mode is turned OFF, a Line Feed that would move CAP into the bottom margin is allowed. If text printing is attempted within the unprintable region at the bottom of the page, a hardware page break occurs, the text is printed on the next sheet of print media, and then a software page break occurs. The result is an unplanned, extra page, which contains only that portion of the text which invaded the unprintable region.

Allow ½ inch at the bottom of the page. This extra ½ inch can mean a loss of 3 lines. For example, on an 11 inch page, the full-page length is 66 lines (6 lines per inch). However, the effective page length is 10 ½ inches, or 63 lines.

6.2.1Current Active Position (CAP)

CAP is the position at which the next character will be printed on the page. This position can be moved to different points on the logical page using the cursor positioning commands. CAP cannot be moved outside the bounds of the logical page, except when moving to another logi- cal page.

CAP position (0,0) is at the left edge of the logical page at the current top margin position. Since the top margin can be changed using a printer command, the physical location of the

18 HP DeskJet 600, 700, 800, 900 & HP 2000 Series PCL Developer’s Guide