Panorama now honors the Page Setup scaling value, so you can print at 50% or 125% or whatever you want. This works both when you print or preview from the File menu and when using the printtopdf statement.
This is great news.
What remains unchanged in Panorama X, when the scaling for the data sheet or any form or procedure is set in Page Setup then the same scaling figure applies to all the others, so scaling in Page Setup is of little use if one’s goal is to fine tune the printed sizes of a variety of forms. Fortunately using the printtopdf statement avoids this problem.
This is one of those no win situations. Keeping separate page setup configurations caused no end of tech support problems from customers that didn’t understand it. “I set the Page Setup, and it forgot” (because they had set it for the data sheet, or a different form) – “You mean I have to set the Page Setup SEPARATELY for every form? How annoying!! Why can’t I just set it once like other programs?”
But I thought it was an essential feature of Panorama early on. In those days there was only coarse control of font sizing (which, in PX, you can set with great precision to several decimal places, e.g. 8.45) so it would have been tough to get form output to fit the printed page without different scaling for each form.
I’ll now set scaling at 65% in Print Setup, which works for printing procedures, and use printtopdf to scale differentially when printing forms.
What I am imagining that people want is a Page Setup that will be recognized by those forms that have not previously been specifically set. Thus if a form has not previously been set, it would take on the last setting. There too could be a Set as Default button that could make this more clear to the user.
Maybe what is really needed is an additional properties panel for printable forms, that would replace the Page Setup for that form, and a print button that would automatically use those properties, instead of having to invoke printtopdf.