Hey All, I am trying to print the Sales Invoice Report (for Example) Which forces the footer to be printed at the bottom of the page. When I try to print it out on the client’s Dot Matrix, the last couple of line drop past the end of the page and print on the top of page 2. I talked to Navision about this and as usual they just stated that Dot matrix printers are not recommended with Navision. This is not acceptable to our prospective client and I would like to find a better way to do this. One Idea I had was to remove the Force Print on Bottom for the Footer and Manually set the sizes of each section so that they fit properly on the page. My problem with this is… How do I do this when the body of the invoice is a dynamic size? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Darren Bezzant NCPS NCSD Central Software Ludlow, NB CANADA dbz@nb.aibn.com
Hi, I tend to agree with Navision’s answer - dot matrix printers in Windows environment sucks. However, what I would do is to try the report first on a laserprinter, to check if I get the same problem there. In addition, you should be aware that some printers can only print at a certain distance from the edge of the physical paper. I have experienced this is Word, where the page number was placed too low on the physical page to actually be printed - so I could see the page number in Print Preview, but it wasn’t printed on paper. This also might be part of your problem. /Lars
Concur, dot matrix is a pain. A couple of choices spring to mind. The place in bottom uses the paper size to determine spacing. Normal A4 paper is longer than your usual tractor feed paper so if Navision thinks it is printing to A4, some of the report will go onto the next sheet. You can test this by printing more than one form. If the printer does the first sheet, prints the last few lines at the top of the second sheet and then form feeds on to the third sheet before printing then that should prove the point. If you are using a version of Navision where you can specify the page size then use that property to set the size. The second choice is to open a text file, resdesign the report to write to the text file and then use a command line to send to the printer. This means you can count the number of lines as they go to file and calculate where the bottom of the page is. This is a pain in the neck to do but if it works … A side effect of this is that printing should be faster because you will be sending text to the printer not a graphic with TrueType fonts etc.
One other thing to consider: when we tried using dot matrix printers in Navision, we had fields printing in weird places on the page…i.e., not printing in the proper location. This anomaly was caused by the field length not being long enough in the report designer. When I lengthened the text boxes, they started printing in the proper locations. Also keep your fonts in mind. Navision’s basic design for every report is Helvetica, 7 pt. This is not rendered very well on many dot matrix printers. Change every field to Courier, 8 pt for better results (and sometimes faster printing!). Alternatively, fonts are not downloaded if you use a “Generic / Text Printer” for the Windows print driver. (Even after all that, we still ended up switching to lasers over most of the office! The DMs weren’t worth the trouble.)