Margins

Added April 2020

In A-Shell 6.5.1679 of April 2020, there was a significant change to how APEX displays reports that are being sent to virtual printers. In short, we removed the automatic setting of XORIGIN/YORIGIN to 360 twips (1/4 inch) for virtual printers, such as PDF writers, that do not report a built-in physical margin. Adding the margin looks better in the case where you are thinking in terms of what the report would look like on a real printer, but it's misleading in the case of virtual printers like PDFX. Such virtual printers have no inherent margins, but may add them when viewing in the PDF viewer, or when printing. Note that while this is a change in behavior, it only occurs when APEX is being used to preview output of a virtual printer, which is of questionable utility in the first place; in any case the change doesn't affect the actual printed output.

Unfortunately, this change would cause reports to display differently than the did previously. They may be more correct, but they're also different that what APEX users we're used to. So the behavior was modified again such that that the settings of //XORIGIN,360 and //YORIGIN,360 were added when none was specified—unless the //SETOPTION,NO-AUTO-MARGINS directive specified. This avoids a subtle but possibly unwanted behavior change when updating. Going forward, though, the NO-AUTO-MARGINS option is recommended.