Printout Fontsize Mystery

[Brad Rubin]

I have my Text style, Printout style environment set like so:

Cell[StyleData["Text", "Printout"],
CellMargins->{{0, 0}, {5, 5}},
FontFamily->"Times New Roman",
FontSize->12,
FontWeight->"Plain",
FontSlant->"Plain"]

All of my magnification options are set to 1.

So, why does the print font look more like 10 point instead of 12?

-- Brad

[David Reiss]

Because, for reasons I have never understood, the Printout Style
Environment in the Core.nb baseline stylesheet has a global
Magnification->0.8 setting. (note that you cannot edit this
stylesheet).

It always has puzzled me as to these Printout settings....

To get around this create a private style sheet for your notebook and
in it put in a cell and go to Cell>ShowExpression and edit the cell to
be the following (and then go to Cell>HideExpression:

Cell[StyleData[All, "Printout"],
PageWidth->PaperWidth,
CellLabelMargins->{{2, Inherited}, {Inherited, Inherited}},
ShowAutoStyles->False,
ShowSyntaxStyles->False,
AutoStyleOptions->{"HighlightMisspelledWords"->False},
ScriptMinSize->5,
MenuPosition->1500,
PrivateFontOptions->{"FontType"->"Outline"},
Magnification->1]

However note that this only changes this for those cellstyles that
inherit the setting from the top level (Text style is an example).
However if the cellstyle (e.g., Input) has its own explicit setting
in the stylesheet then that will override this and you will need to
create a version in the private stylesheet for that.

--David

[Sjoerd C. de Vries]

This maybe related to a bug in the JournalArticle stylesheet as
reported here:

http://forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/2010/Jul/msg00020.html

Cheers -- Sjoerd

[Brad Rubin]

Thanks, David and Sjoerd... it works now.

I only needed the magnification fixed in the Text/Printout style, so adding Magnification->1 in that cell fixed it locally for that style, but I also tested your global solution and that affected all Printout cells, as expected.

There are two things that prevented me from figuring out how to fix this:

1. I didn't know that the base style was defined in Core.nb

2. When I opened the Option Inspector on my Text/Printout cell, it showed that the Magnification was 1, so I didn't think that I needed to override it and set it to 1 again. I thought that the Option Inspector was supposed to show the net option value after processing the whole style inheritance hierarchy? If so, the option value should have appeared as 0.8 instead of 1, and I would have known to override it to 1.

-- Brad