Text file’s font too small (Any, or XP)

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I was wondering if you could suggest a starting point for a problem that I have. I have information in a *.txt file that is formatted to print out on a medical UB-92 form. The problem is that the *.txt file information is in the wrong scale. It seems to print the page out an unknown percentage too small and in a way that the information does not print out into the right boxes on the form. How would I go about rescaling the printout to match the form? Is there an Office application that can enlarge what

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Plain text, by definition, has no assigned formatting. Each application is free to render it as it wishes (e.g., any font, any size, any weight). Where do these text files come from? Are they “print to disk” output from another application?

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As I understand your problem, you have pre-printed forms and want to print information into appropriate boxes of this form.

There is several solutions to your problem. For example, you can create Word document with textboxes in certain places of the page and put information into them (you can insert form image as unprintable watermark). But the best decision is using Adobe Acrobat insert fields into HCFA-1450 (formerly UB-92) Form, save modified PDF file and use it (even with Acrobat Reader) to print filled forms.

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Essentially the information is “print to disk” information. It’s not so much that the font size is an issue (as the reply implies that *.txt files have no font), but if the whole page could be printed to “fit to page” like one can in Excel, the formatting would (in theory) line up.

We have an application called Monarch that can take “print to file,” report-looking info and turn it into Excel or a CSV. The best solution I’ve been able to come up with is to use Monarch to scrape what I need and then VBA to format the output.

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If you open the plain text file in Word, is it padded out with spaces? If so, try applying the Plain Text style to see if that matches the original. Probably not exactly, due to wider margins, headers, etc. Try duplicating that style (e.g., PlainText1) and experimenting with the Font Size definition until you find the one that fits, then create a custom template containing that style. (Of course, if the problem is only in two dimensions (left to right spacing), this gets a bit trickier because you have to play with the paragraph formattting too…) In the future, it would simply be File|New…, Insert|File, Select All, apply Font, print. I think.

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Is it possible to change the default font of the printer? The printer manual may have some instructions.
I recall in the days of using Win95 our HPLasers came with a utility (maybe DOS-based?) that allowed you to change from the factory set default, and this affected any plain and unformatted text file sent to printer.
It may simply be a matter of increasing the font size by a few points – and possibly making it a fixed-pitch type – to achieve the right scaling.

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