Help a long time Mac fan?

[Steven]

I am designgin some business cards to print on Avery 8371. At first, I was wondering something I could never figure out in 23 yrs of Mac use....how to get smooth edges on my drawings. The text is smooth, why not the circle? I went on line and found a work-around that really works. Set the page set up to 25% and zoom the page to 25% and draw everything 4 times the needed size. Prints very smoothly. Got one card all done, printed out about 15 different versions while I was tightening up colors, spacing, etc. Duplicated 9 more and laid them all out on the page. Hit print.....nope. “Printing Stopped”. Why? No reason given. Tried many times. Went back to the one card that printed before. “Printing Stopped”. Tried a new text only doc... printed no problem, as did the test page, the diagnostics page and a fresh drawing page. Changed a color on the single card that would not print, and lo and behold, it printed. “ah ha! Problem solved. That color is acceptable, duped 9 more and laid them out and.....nope. “Printing Stopped”. It will not print. I need these a.s.ap.! I am stumped and cannot find this one in the archives. I am using 10.3.9, eMac, HP 2600 Photosmart, all of which works perfectly on everything else. Any ideas?

Thanks ahead of time, this site is great. And I still find it easier to use AW for the designs I do. I have Open Office but you can’t turn off that Autogrid. That feature is the best.

[Steven]

This is really weird. I went back to work on it some more, and isolated one of the cards and deleted the others from from the 10 card lay out. the frame for it is way over to the right, so I moved the card off the screen to the left, and there are two - what looks like small SS's 8 rows high and 2 wide! They are off the screen to the right when the card is on the page. Where did they come from ??? What are they? I pulled apart another copy and a second card when isolated also had 2 of these strange things in the same place. Anyone ever heard of that?

[Steven]

I thought I had it. I got rid of those "SS's or whatever they were, but still it won't print. It printed fine earlier, I don't get it.

[Barry]

I am designing some business cards to print on Avery 8371. At first, I was wondering something I could never figure out in 23 yrs of Mac use....how to get smooth edges on my drawings. The text is smooth, why not the circle? I went on line and found a work-around that really works. Set the page set up to 25% and zoom the page to 25% and draw everything 4 times the needed size. Prints very smoothly. Got one card all done, printed out about 15 different versions while I was tightening up colors, spacing, etc. Duplicated 9 more and laid them all out on the page. Hit print.....nope. “Printing Stopped”. Why? No reason given. Tried many times. Went back to the one card that printed before. “Printing Stopped”. Tried a new text only doc... printed no problem, as did the test page, the diagnostics page and a fresh drawing page. Changed a color on the single card that would not print, and lo and behold, it printed. “ah ha! Problem solved. That color is acceptable, duped 9 more and laid them out and.....nope. “Printing Stopped”. It will not print. I need these a.s.ap.! I am stumped and cannot find this one in the archives. I am using 10.3.9, eMac, HP 2600 Photosmart, all of which works perfectly on everything else. Any ideas?

Thanks ahead of time, this site is great. And I still find it easier to use AW for the designs I do. I have Open Office but you can’t turn off that Autogrid. That feature is the best.

From your description, it sounds like you are doing this in the Draw or Paint environment. That may be a factor in the "printing stopped" problem. Using Draw requires that you make 10 copies of your card. You've also done a 4x (linear) magnification (increasing the pixel count of your image 16x). This leads to a pretty large image, which may be choking the printing process.

AppleWorks Business Card Assistant uses the AW database environment to lay out 10 copies of a business card on a page. The artwork is created a single time, then repeated 10 times on the page—a much more memory efficient process that may end the choking process.

Try transferring your card design to a database document produced by the Business Card Assistant. This may require remaking the images, but I'm guessing that if the whole card is scalable that won't be necessary.

To create the file:
Show Starting Points (command-1) then click on the Assistants tab.
Click the Business Card button, then click through the Assistant's dialogues, accepting the default choices. You'll need to specify a field for at least one line on the card.

When your cards are displayed, press shift-command-L to go to layout mode, then select and delete everything that is on the card's layout. Take care to NOT move the Body boundary on the layout as this controls verticle spacing on the layout.

Switch to your current card document and copy a single copy of your current card.

Go back to the DB document and Paste.

Move the pasted card design into its desired location and resize to fit the space.

To improve graphics resolution, go to the AppleWorks menu, choose Preferences. In Preferences, find the Fractional character widths setting and check the checkbox.

Close Preferences, then press shift-command-B to go to Browse mode and see your page of cards.

You may need to do some tweaking of the top and left margin settings (Format > Document...) to adjust the placing of the cards on the page, so do your test prints on plain paper rather than the Avery business card stock. Right and Bottom margins may be set to 0 (this will likely generate an error message when printing, but the message may be ignored.) Increase the left margin to shift everything right. Increase the top margin to shift everything down.

Regards,
Barry