I was wondering how I could print a report or do check printing on a

laser printer that would resemble printing within a windows environment. Do I need 3rd party drivers?

Thanks,

Scott

Scott,

I've done similar stuff, fancy formatted reports, using the PCL command set. This uses escape sequences to pass formatting commands to any printer that understands PCL. You can find more information on PCL, inlcuding commands, from HP's website.

msorrel@greyhound.com

I use MERGE and fonts 1-16 in Printer Definition with laserjet codes. Forms Electric is great for downloading forms developed in windows (using word, excel or any windows program) and logos.

Something like check printing can be accomplished using Microsoft Word with mailmerge. Write the checks data to a tab delimited file with column headings. This tab delimited data file should have an extension of '.DOC' . Set up a Word mail merge template to fit your check stock, write a vbscript macro to open open word, perform the mailmerge. If you do not know how to write the vbscript you can turn on the macro recorder in WORD, perform the mail merge by hand, stop the recorder, edit the macro, cut, paste to notepad, save as myscript.vbs, edit as needed.

To run the script from Arev try 'SUSPEND START myscript.vbs' or 'SUSPEND CSCRIPT myscript.vbs'.

This can also be a nice way to do simple bar coded labels.

Hope this helps

Bob

bob@winwinsol.com

Bob,

This tab delimited data file should have an extension of '.DOC' .

This is not necessary. You can use just about any recognized file extension you want. The only important thing is that an import driver that knows how to read the file is installed on the machine.

One warning though. There is a nasty bug in Word when you are using an ODBC driver (even the Text ODBC driver) to do mail merges with date fields. If, in your merge template, you have a merge field with a "date picture", which is a formatting command, and the corresonding field in the data file is blank, you will get strange results. What we have noticed is that if it is the first record in the merge, the current day's date will be filled. If it is any subsequent record, the last date value that was used will be propagated throughout the merge. The only workaround for this is too not use an ODBC driver to read the data source. For text files, when you are selecting the data source, there is a check box that says "Select Method". Make sure this is checked, and then choose the driver that does not have ODBC in it.

Just thought I would pass this along, since it took us several days to figure out what was happening.

msorrel@greyhound.com

Thanks Matt.

I have not been using ODBC, just flat text files. I thought we stumbled into .DOC as a trick to get it to work; perhaps that was just a coincidence. You did remind me that we needed to install the text document converter for this to work.

Bob

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