Subject: Re: Printing question
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Jan 11 2001 - 13:01:38 CST
james> I think MS Word is right - isn't collating meant to collate all
james> the copies of the same page together? (I thought it was
james> originally designed back in the days when generating a page
james> bitmap to send to the printer took a /long/ time, so switching
james> 'collate' on would speed things up for multiple copies, because
james> each page was generated once then printed multiple times,
james> instead of being generated multiple times, once for each copy.)
Various points:
1. In MSWord 2000, the collate checkbox makes "123123". Unchecking
it makes "112233". In other words, they do it the way we think it
should be done.
2. Regardless of what the checkbox label is, there is a picture of
pages with numbers on them, and the picture changes to match the state
of the checkbox. For pseudo-ambiguous stuff like "collate", this is
just about a must-have.
3. "Collate" actually means to put copies in correct numerical order,
not to put all like pages together. It predates word processing by
billions of years. There used to be a step in the printing/publishing
of any big document called "collation" (before photocopiers could do
it for us) where you laid out stacks of pages on a table and went
along picking up one of each to make complete copies. There was a
stapler at the end of the table. Some organizations had staff areas
who did pretty much only this.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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