posted 12 years ago
If you're using a continuous-form (fan-fold) printer - which it certainly sounds like you are - you are very likely running into a conflict between printer options and OS options on page length.
A lot of printers featured an automatic skip-over-perforation function designed to permit printing long continuous sets of lines while automatically jumping over the perforated section where you tear pages apart, since otherwise you'd end up with half a line on one page and the other half of the line on another page.
So if the OS is attempting to manage the page size AND the hardware (printer) is attempting to manage page size, chaos is the outcome.
Fortunately, the skip-over-perf option can usually be be switched off by adding the appropriate control sequence to the printed output. Or occasionally by running a software or hardware utility (in some cases, flipping a DIP switch on the printer). That's vendor-dependent, so consult the printer's instruction manual.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.