Perhaps what you should do, is tell Excel you're printing on custom-sized (8.5in by 5.5in) paper, but tell the printer driver you're printing on 11x8.5?
Perhaps newer versions of Excel can do that, buy my version (2003) offers me 26 pre-defined paper sizes, as does the PCL6 driver, except that in booklet mode there are only 15 pre-defined sizes. I cannot specify a custom size.
# Excel thinks it's printing on 11x8.5 paper, and formats its output correspondingly. It sends this off to the printer driver.
# The printer driver, without telling Excel about it, takes these 11x8.5 pages, and rotates and scales them so they fit on half an 11x8.5 page each: a 8.5x5.5 page, in fact.
Well, sort of, but there's another factor complicating things. If I specify (either in Excel or in the PCL6) that the page is landscape, then the only option I have for booklet printing is the one diagrammed earlier where the columns print one above each other rather than side by side. Regardless of whether I specify portrait or landscape in Excel, the booklet printout is oriented so that the wide aspect of the paper is left-right. I have to tell the booklet printer that I want to print portrait so the columns are side by side, and setting that forces the Excel page setup to match. Very confusing.
For whatever reason, printing on legal size paper works out quite nicely with pages 7" wide by 8.5" tall, even though it violates the 1:root 2 aspect ratio rule.
tanstaafl.
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