You're not supposed to be able to change settings in your visitors computer. Working as designed. Of course, I could write a Web browser that would let you. But noone would (hopefully) use my browser if so designed.

Why?
OK, so you're a nice guy. You wouldn't try to change any settings in my computer unless I explicitly agree to it while visiting your site. Fine. But the next site I visit might have an evil Webmaster. Changing all sorts of settings in my computer, without asking me first. OK, so I could clean up and decide to never visit the evil site again.

Now, imagine that it's my Mother visiting that evil guys site. She'd never be able to reset things as they were. She'd have to bring her PC to the shop "to get it repaired".

I hope you get the point. You're nice, but not everyone is as kind as you are.

"Livet är hårt" sa bonden.
"Grymt" sa grisen...

Why don't you take the data and superimpose it on the IRS form on your server and then you can have absolute control on how it prints.

If you want to control how a document prints you will likely need to learn Adobe's PostScript language which is a language for controlling how documents print. There are commands in PostScript that allow you to set the margin to whatever you like.

metadoktor

"The doktor is in."

And PostScript is fun, in a twisted kind of way. Stack based languages are neat.
You have complete control over every aspect of document rendering with PostScript, margins are just the tip of the iceberg.
I used to use it to print up my own made up magic cards. (Of course nowadays, I'd probably script it in perl with the gimp or GD).

-pete
Entropy is not what is used to be.

There was a PDF question about fillout-forms a while back called Dynamic Forms. The approach I outlined is still reasonable, although there has been progress since then in the perl modules that work directly with PDF files.

The IRS forms don't need to be dumb images, they are actually reasonable PDF files that you can work with.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

Unless there's a browser that executes Perl from a HTML file that I just haven't heard about, this really doesn't look like a Perl question.

You might have better luck if you try coding this in JavaScript. I have no idea whether JavaScript can check or change a browser's printer settings, but at least the probability of that is higher than trying to do it at the server.

I've not played with this -- but checkout meadroid.com/scriptx

Or, if you've eaten a bowl of hot peppers and feel antsy, you could write a Perl client application which does this on their computer. Hard to tweak though. Been looking at Ch. 5 of Windows NT Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions by Dave Roth. (My New Years present to myself).

Looks like M$ published an OLE reference to Office 97 which conceivably could help you find out how their printer is set up. Likewise you could write an ActiveX in Perl that does this task. Same book tells all (well, much) Nothing in it about printers per se, though there is stuff about accessing shares. I think this is frontier stuff cowboy..

Well, I just googled with keywords OLE printer margin. Hmm, first hit gives me "XL.ActiveSheet.PageSetup.LeftMargin = 18"! Run that through the mixer! Add the keyword "automation" and there's a lot more links to go through.

Finally I found something called "HOWTO: Use a VB ActiveX Component for Word Automation From Internet Explorer (Q286023)". Huh. M$ says it is a good way to get load off the server. Anyway, seems like this could be done in Perl too.

Of course this is totally useless if your customers are on Linux which is happening a bit more rapidly these days. Server side maybe is the safest since you don't have to wrestle with possibly badly documented object models etc.

Have you tried generating a PDF using PDFLib.com or just generating a HTML file and then pushing it through a PS/PDF convertor such as HTML2PS? Don't forget you could use CSS to set the media layout for each page when displaying it.

The really difficult bit is making sure that not only has the user removed any specific print margins, footers and hearders, but that the paper is aligned in the printer correctly and the right way round... Sometimes it is easier to ignore the pre-printed paper and print the entire form from scratch to your (tweaked) specifications.