Bug: Page margins and tabs in Header and Footer

[mwdiers]

I already submitted this to support@redlers.com. I posted here so that the workaround is in the forums.

I have discovered a bug in Mellel's handling of the page margins and tabs in headers and footers.

I have a Letter page, with 0.5 inch page margins all around. This gives me a usable width of 7.5 inches. I want a header with a right-align tab set at 7.5 inches.

In the Page Style editor, however, the usable width is 7.375 inches. It appears that, for whatever reason, the Page Style editor is ignoring the Document margins.

In the Page Style editor, I cannot place a tab at 7.5 inches. Even if I select a tab mark, and use the Margins & Tabs Palette to change the tab to 7.5 inches, it will not work. The tab disappears entirely, or behaves erratically, adding an extra blank line to the header.

There appears to be a GUI limitation at work here also. I cannot expand the Page Style editor dialog box so as to display more of the ruler. Perhaps it is this GUI limitation that is causing the problem.

I did find a workaround. I can edit the header/footer from within the document, and then use the Layout->Page Style->Save changes to Style command.

I am running Mellel 2.2.7.1 on OS 10.5.1.

[donb]

I never use inches, only points (and very occasionally centimeters), but I presume the method I use for perfect right alignment would work equally well with inches.

Suppose my right margin is at 541 points. If I set the reverse tab for 451 points, it won't appear. But if I set it as 450.99 points (or even 450.999 points) the tab does appear at the right spot. Since the human eye cannot perceive one thousandth of a point, this is more than adequate as an approximation to 451.

Inches is a devil of a measurement system for very tiny measurements, so in setting your tab for this purpose you might switch to points as the measuring method, and then when you switch back to inches Mellel will do the conversion from points to inches for you.

Don Broadribb

[mwdiers]

This has nothing to do with precision. I can type in a tab measurement precisely at the right margin in inches, points, picas (my preference) or centimeters, and that works just fine.

The bug is with page styles, which impose an artificial limit on the addressable width in the GUI.

[TLS]

I seem to be having a similar problem. I am trying to set up a document to A4 paper size with margins of 72 pt top and bottom (= 1 inch), and 90 pt on the left and right. This looks just fine on the screen, but when I print the footer is entirely too high up on the page. If I set the bottom margin to about 30 pt, it prints ok, but looks too low on the screen.

Not a big deal, but a bit frustrating.

[Mart°n]

I seem to be having a similar problem. I am trying to set up a document to A4 paper size with margins of 72 pt top and bottom (= 1 inch), and 90 pt on the left and right. This looks just fine on the screen, but when I print the footer is entirely too high up on the page. If I set the bottom margin to about 30 pt, it prints ok, but looks too low on the screen.

Not a big deal, but a bit frustrating.

This may be a problem with your printer because different printers have different page margins (the margin that is not printable at all). Most Laser-Printers have a 3 mm border at all sides of the paper, most inkjet printers have about 3mm on the top, left & right margin but up to 2 cm at the bottom. So this could cause your trouble. If you have a more modern inkjet printer, maybe you could enable a “borderless printing mode” that enables the printer to have no borders at all. This could solve your problem but your printer may print slower in this mode.