I have a Postscript file that was intended to be printed on 11x17 paper. But under Mac OSX, the preview program insists on cropping it to letter size. If I actually print it to 11x17 paper, it gets cropped to letter size and then centered in the 11x17 sheet.
(Note that the preview program always converts to pdf as an intermediate step).
Clearly, the generated pdf file is a letter-sized pdf file. I'm guessing that my Postscript file is missing some sort of syntactical sugar to clue the pdf converter as to what the paper size is, but I'm at a loss. I've tried inserting %%DocumentMedia and %%BeginPaperSize comments into the document at what I take are the right locations, but no effect.
I also tried moving the document to a Linux system, running ps2pdf, and moving the resulting pdf file back to the Mac. No effect. And ps2pdf has never done me wrong before, so that's what makes me think that the problem lies in my Postscript rather than in Apple's pdf converter.
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 792 1224
%%Creator: template plugin by Edward Falk
%%DocumentMedia: Tabloid 792 1224 0 () ()
%%Pages: 1
%%PageOrder: Ascend
%%DocumentData: Clean7Bit
%%EndComments
%%BeginDefaults
%%PageMedia: Tabloid
%%EndDefaults
%%BeginProlog
/drawmarker { % x y --
gsave
translate
newpath
0 -0.5 moveto 0 0.5 lineto
-0.5 0 moveto 0.5 0 lineto
0 0 .25 0 360 arc
stroke
grestore
} bind def
/drawmodel {
newpath
86.250 35.750 moveto
80.536 45.500 lineto
86.250 35.750 moveto
103.000 35.750 lineto
80.536 45.500 moveto
103.000 45.500 lineto
103.000 35.750 lineto
stroke
} bind def
%%EndProlog
%%Page: "1" 1
gsave
72 72 scale
-79.54 -34.75 translate
1 72 div setlinewidth
drawmodel
80.54 35.75 drawmarker
89.54 35.75 drawmarker
80.54 50.75 drawmarker
89.54 50.75 drawmarker
grestore
showpage
%%EndPage: "1" 1
%%EOF
Your PostScript doesn't request a page size. Lines beginning '%' are comments in PostScript and don't have any effect (some PostScript consumers will parse DSC comments, which confuses the issue...)
If you want 11x17 media, you need to ask for it:
<</PageSize [792 1224]>> setpagedevice
Without that you get the default media, whatever that may be. Blank lines are permitted in PostScript and have no effect, a DSC parser which behaves differently with blank lines present is a broken parser, but as I understand it gv is really very old.