On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 01:49:09PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:

Steve Fosdick wrote:

...

Has anyone had occasion to use the "Print Postage" service from Royal Mail? Does it reply on installing any proprietry software on your PC (including Adobe Flash) or is it usable from a normal web browser?

It creates a PDF which you print. It should work OK on Linux and I think I may have used it from my Ubuntu desktop, but I'm not 100% sure.

Works fine under Firefox + evince on Debian in my experience.

J.

First of all thanks to all who responded to this thread. Your experience has given me the confidence to try it.

On 27/10/2008 14:58:20, MJ Ray wrote:

I've used it and it works (requires cookies and javascript IIRC), but the PDFs seem to use Acrobat bits that suffer the common "screen as landscape, rotate 90 to print" problem, so I tend to select whichever option is portrait on screen too (2 A5 labels per page?) and either use C5 envelopes (which still count as Letter) or glue the labels onto larger packets.

I found the DL envelope option worked well.

Using galeon as the web browser I had no problems and their site gave me a PDF to download which I opened in evince. To get this to print on the DL envelope I had to chose "File/Print Setup" and then chose "DL Envelope" for the paper size and "Portrait" for the orientation which seems sligtly odd as the image is displayed on screen in landscape.

Perhaps it refers only to the only to the orientation of the paper in the printer - for me the envelope has to be fed in portrait mode otherwise there is not enough length to the media for the feed mechanism to work properly.

Giving the Royal Mail larger envelopes than necessary, as well as paying piddling amounts by credit card, seems like justice for the silly sods closing my three nearest post offices simultaneously.

I was going to say that these are separate businesses but then I found that Royal Mail and Post Office Counters are both part of the Royal Mail Group.

As far as closing the post offices it never ceases to amaze me that we (as a country) privatise what was a public utility and then wonder why they start behaving like most other businesses in maximising income, minimising cost and furthering the interests of their shareholders rather than provide a public service.

It is only when there is strong competition that companys are forced to be good for their customers for fear of losing them. In the case of the post office counters service we have some competition for some of the services in the densely populated areas and none at all in rural areas.

Another factor that does not help is that even when there is competition, for some services the customer is not the individual but some other organisation. If, for example, the government is placing a contract for a counter service to, for example, pay pensions it is the government that is the customer not the pensioner. So, the post office close some of their counters, the pensioners suffer but they are not the customer so that's alright then?

If we are determined to work this way then better regulation is required, i.e. a universal service obligation.

Steve.