I have a couple of suggestions regarding the Printer.DLL and the Utility function

1) Allow PRINTER.DLL to return the handle for the current printer.

This would allow other api calls to be made to enable additional print functionality (including setting draftmode) in the same print session.

2) Allow the Utility("CHOOSEFONT"….. call to specify the printer as the device context for font selection.

Printer fonts (the ones with the little Printer icon and usually CPI in the font name) are displayed in the current call.

I know a lot of people have opted to use Splaver's softwares OIPI to provide the print functionality with OpenInsight, and that OIPI allows me to do both of these things.

We also use OIPI for our newer OI products in addition to Revelation reporter. These tools satisfy most if not all of our current needs.

We really like OIPI, however we have been developing with OI for a long time and have almost a thousand coded reports that make use of Printer.DLL. I dont want to have to re-visit all of these reports.

Printer.DLL is fine for what it does and in the situations where we have used Printer.DLL it works well.

UNLESS, the client Insist that their reports print on their $30,000 dot matrix printers.. This isnt an isolated situation a surprising number of our clients have invested in heavy duty dot matrix printers, and they want to use them for everything, as their laser printers are to slow.

As will be aware, there are a number of 'issues' that will crop up when printing with dot-matrix printers ( Microsoft have an Knowledge base article . artice-id Q148348, that outlines these). These issues and murphy's law pretty much guarantee that these reports print very slowly on these very expensive printers.

We have put a good deal of effort into solving these problems and have found that if you can use a printer font, and specify draftmode you can provide normal high speed printing on these dot matrix printers.

Are these suggestions, something that would expect too seee at some time in the future?

Cheers

Sam McDonald.

Sam,

Thanks for the suggestions for Printer.dll and in general printing functionality for OI. We have put together alot the printing issues here at Revelation and we will be doing our best to resolve them so we can put them in future releases.

Thanks again for your suggestions!

Blaise

View this thread on the Works forum...