Quick Report label printing problem on NT 4 environment
Borce Kocevski
The problem is the following:
Windows 95 environment
First we were just using Quick Report that comes together with Delphi3 (I
think version 2.0c). Whenever we tried to preview a custom page size report
(label of a size 50x31 mm) depending on the default printer set up we would
get different results. Although the report was supposed to be printed on a
printer that supports custom page size, if the default printer did not
support custom page size the report would be previewed as many labels on an
A4 format. But if the default printer also supported custom page size the
preview was alright (1 label per page, format 50x31mm).
We somehow solved this problem by temporarily changing the default Windows
printer to the one supposed to print the labels. Than we would print the
labels and return back the original default printer.
But this is not acceptable by our customers. Our application is printing
regular reports and labels. They want regular reports to be printed on their
default printer, and labels to be printed on their Zebra printer.
Windows NT 4 environment
The problem here is the same as above but with worse consequences. First it
is very hard to find a driver for NT that supports custom page size (In this
environment the only printer driver that we found and that could supported
custom page size was Stylys 400 color). And second user rights could be
restricted. For example at our customer site users of our application
working on an NT workstation can not change their default printer. This
means that the above temporary solution from above is not good at all.
Both Environments
Then we thought that maybe with the Quick Report Professional 3.0.4 and
Delphi 4 we could solve the problem, but result was the same.
Conclusion
Let's draw a conclusion. When we need to print labels on a Zebra printer we
want to be able to build the preview on the appropriate printer no matter if
it is default printer or not. The other problem is that even the Zebra
printer driver we have supports any page size, we can get the proper preview
of the report only on Windows 95 (when Zebra printer is default) and not on
Windows NT (with the NT driver for the same Zebra printer).
Can you please help us with a possible solution.
We have Service pack 5 applied on our NT 4.
The Zebra driver we are using is very recent. The printer driver our client
is using is Zebra T300.
Best Regards,
Borce Kocevski