Re: Libreoffice: printing "dirties" the file being printed
On Thu 07 Apr 2022 at 10:45:46 (+0100), Gareth Evans wrote:
> On Thu 7 Apr 2022, at 09:58, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 02, 2022 at 07:08:11PM +0100, Brad Rogers wrote:
> >>Tools menu/Options - General; 'Printing sets "document modified" status'
> >
>
> > Does anyone have any insight into why this is an option? More
> > specifically, what reason would anyone want to have their document
> > marked as modified because they printed it?
>
> I wondered about that too and looked into it. I now can't find the references I found, either in my browser history or by re-searching, but iirc, Apple[-related] and LibreOffice forum posts suggested it's to do with:
>
> LO: MS Word does it, so LO does it / because fields in the document may be automatically updated prior to printing
>
> Apple: Pages documents include a "last printed" property which gets updated when the doc is printed - which suggests there's no option in that case.
>
> Not sure of the accuracy of either report...
… nor of my memory.
I was never a wysiwy(d)g person, but I do remember when many people
started using Macs back in the '80s. When they selected a printer,
typically adjustments were made to the document to suit the settings
in the printer, and then they'd save the document, which AIUI retained
those settings. To them, that seemed a normal part of the document
metaphor.
Sometimes, of course, those tiny adjustments would cause major changes
in layout (like when the next figure doesn't _quite_ fit on the bottom
of a page), which caused a great deal of frustration.
OTOH when I printed my PDFs on, say, a printer whose paper gripper
created an oversize margin, I'd imperceptibly shrink the documents
to fit, but the original LaTeX source files would obviously be
unaffected, as would the layout. Of course, I'd have to make my own
note of any changes if I wanted to repeat them in future.
Cheers,
David.
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