Design choice for Printout Screen Environment

[David Reiss]

When Printing the default Screen Environment is "Printout". I have
always been puzzled about the design choice for one setting for this
environment. This is that the Magnification is set to 0.8. Hence,
printing of, for example, a Text cell in 10 point type, is rendered on
the printed page as effective 8 point type.

I cannot think of any sensible reason for this design choice (and I am
very often having to fix this for people who want to see as Printed
what they set up in their working notebook, which is usually worked
with on the screen in the Working environment.

It is, of course, easy to change this by editing the stylesheet...
but it seems a very non intuitive design choice....

Thoughts?

--David

[Bob F]

I would hazard a guess about it having to do with the aspect ratio of
a normal 8.5x11 page which is .7727272727272727... and 0.8 is close
enough. But this is a pure guess on my part.

-Bob

[David Reiss]

I suspect not. The only thing that I can come up with is that this
changes the default size for graphics (Plots for example) so that they
will not run off of the side of the page. However, as a design
choice, this throws out the baby with the bath water. The graphics do
indeed need to be rescaled to look good on a printed page; but to
change all fonts & c as well alters the expectations that 12 point
type should print as 12 point type. Perhaps it was the only choice
that managed the variety of issues, but it's not the correct one in my
opinion so that expected document design is what the user gets.

Of course one might work in the Printing Environment, but that is not
the way most people use Mathematica...

--David