Creating 3x5 cards in Word 2003

[Mcburks]

I work for a hospital/nursing home and we need to come up with a way to print dietary cards (cards w/ a patient's diet/menu on them) that can be thrown away after each meal. Our situation is kind of unique in that we have a software solution for our hospital but not for our nursing home. Our Hospital Information System (HIS) will automatically print out 3x5 cards for our hospital patients on a dotmatrix printer that form feeds these cards. The printer is actually hooked up to the dietary PC so it is a standard Windows printer. I have the word document layed out like I like with the correct number of pages for the number of patients we have. To keep everything layed out correctly I'm using page breaks. Well, for some reason when the printer hits that page break it feed up 11" like it's printing on a standard sheet of paper. Does anyone have any ideas how to keep that from happening? Is there something I can do in Word or would that be a printer issue? (It's an OkiData MicroLine 320 T/S).

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

-Matt


Thanks,
Matt B

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

Fo you have your File > Page Setup - Paper Tab set up for the correct paper size?

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[Mcburks]

Yes, I have the size of the paper set to:
Paper Size: Custom Size
Width 5"
Height 3"


Thanks,
Matt B

 

[SkipVought]

Most office printers are sheet fed. Come to think of it, I have not seen a continuous form printer in an office for decades.

Does your Continuous Form Printer Driver, not have some sort of feed option? The paper handling is quite different between sheet and continuous form.

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[Mcburks]

Hmm, I'm not sure. Any ideas where I would check that? Would it just be in the Printer Properties?


Thanks,
Matt B

 

[SkipVought]

Yes.

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[Mcburks]

I dug around in the driver settings and I didn't come across anything that I thought would help out any. I'm not sure where to turn to at this point.


Thanks,
Matt B

 

[SkipVought]

"keep everything layed out correctly I'm using page breaks."

What does that mean?

If you have your custom paper size set up correctly, you will get the proper page breaks without doing anything else. Maybe you have TWO breaks in there for each page: Word's and yours.


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[Mcburks]

Possibly, I have removed them I believe and it still does the feed of 11" when it hits it's own break.

What I have is something like this:

Card No:____________
Name:_________________ Rm #_______

Breakfast:________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________

Card No:____________
Name:_________________ Rm #_______

Breakfast:________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________

Card No:____________
Name:_________________ Rm #_______

Breakfast:________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________

Card No:____________
Name:_________________ Rm #_______

Breakfast:________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________
__________________________________

<etc>

Everywhere that you see a _____ I have actually setup a Form field so that I can lock the document so they can't edit the text I put in there. If I don't put a page break it will allow them to move it out of alignment if they enter two lines under breakfast.


Thanks,
Matt B

 

[SkipVought]

All that Word does is issue a FF character to the Printer.

The PRINTER then takes the FF character and decides what to do with it.

Are there hardware settings that affect paper length?

Check out

http://innovativeusers.org/faqs/print/hardware.html#recommendedSettings

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