Monthly Archives: May 2010

Tweaks & Tech

Fixed-width printing in IE6

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve had the time (and I suppose inclination) to update things.  What with one thing after another, I’ve either been too busy or too tired to post.


But it’s been a moderately quiet day – and I feel like putting something up 🙂


I’ll save other posts for later (posts that I need to upload pictures for) and will just write a little tech-related blurb.  Probably not useful for the majority of folks, but something I can use for future reference.


In the office we have a web-based vendor application that is fairly ancient.  The hardware itself is not too terribly antiquated, and the OS is running WinXP, but the client application requires requires either Netscape 4.x or IE6(!).  This system has been in place since before I started working here about 4 years ago, and hasn’t really needed much in terms of maintenance.  However, a couple of weeks ago, the hard drive crapped out – from the sound of things I’d guess that the actuator arm was either broken or stuck as it would give a few loud clicks and then putter out.


We replaced the computer, downgraded to IE6 and all seemed well until the users tried to print – turned out that most of the pages were just a few millimeters too wide and would get clipped off during the printing.  So I started troubleshooting…


Initially I thought that it was an issue with the printer driver (we also installed a new printer).  However, I soon noticed that not all pages were clipped off when printing, only some with a few extra characters in a cell.


Turns out that IE7 and above have an auto-fit feature, but not IE6.  When I spoke with the users, I found that they had previously used Netscape which I assume had a method for adjusting page size.


So… I started looking for older versions of Netscape.  I did find them at the old Netscape archive, but was unable to export a necessary security certificate from IE6 to that version of Netscape.  I considered other workarounds like saving the webpage to USB drive and bringing that to a computer with IE7 – which worked, but was not particularly handy.  I also tried saving in different formats and seeing if those would print any differently (it didn’t).  It was an annoying issue – something so minor, but aggravating!


Finally after Googling for IE6 shrink-to-fit alternatives (I quickly found that I was not the only one with this problem!), I came across THIS site.


Adrian’s fix requires the installation of an ActiveX control which then creates a new printer icon that adjusts the page you’re trying to print to the width of the paper.  I don’t pretend to understand exactly how it works, but I do know that it worked perfectly!


It is pretty awesome that a bit of software created almost 7 years ago is still so handy – and best of all FREE!