Printer Font Size Modification

ItzBobWright

i spent some time on this and i would like to share my findings.

there was a previous discussion on one of the notepad++ forums and i drew much of this information from that discussion. my contribution is figuring out how to get this previously described method to work with notepad++ on Windows 7.

there is an XML configuration file, shortcuts.xml, which needs to be modified to add a macro which will decrease the printed font size from the displayed font size by a desired reduction value. this following macro definition needs to be added as shown here under the <Macros> header in the shortcuts.xml file.

<Macros>
    </Macro>
	  <Macro name="smaller_print_by_2" Ctrl="yes" Alt="yes" Shift="no" Key="100">
	  <Action type="0" message="2146" wParam="-4" lParam="0" sParam="" />
    </Macro>
</Macros>

as was explained in the previous thread, this macro reduces the printed font size from the displayed font size by the value in the wParam parameter, shown in the example here as 4 points. i have not verified this, but i assume removing the minus sign will result in a printer font size increase. at any rate, the value shown results in an 8 point font when the global display font is set at 12 points. the Key parameter is determined from the Scintilla code, and in this case the 100 value represents the numeric pad digit 4 key. so you would invoke this macro by using CTRL+ALT+NUMPAD4.

so far most all of this is from the previous posts. however, i could NOT initially get this to work as described until i discovered that while notepad++ saves a copy of the shortcuts.xml file in its install directory, in my installation this is NOT the shortcuts.xml file that notepad++ uses. in fact, by default notepad++ uses a copy of this file located in the %APPDATA% folder. if you enter the command echo %APPDATA% in a dos window, this will display the folder name and path to that variable. in my install this was shown as

[C:\4NT]echo %APPDATA%
C:\Users\Wright\AppData\Roaming

and under this folder is one for notepad++ where you want to place the updated shortcuts.xml

now here is the trick. even running notepad++ as administrator would NOT allow me to save my edited version, that is a copy with the added macro, in this folder. rather than go through ownership travails etc, i just saved a copy of the modified shortcuts.xml file in another folder, exited notepad++, and then copied that over the version contained in the appdata folder.

works like a charm.

hope this helps some of you