Printing problem with HP 4 laserjet

rbuser

When printing reports to a HP 4 laserjet (from Win 2k and XP), I am
experiencing some strange problems with layout e.g. centred labels are
vanishing off the right of the page, and lines being repeated. In print
preview every thing looks fine, but the paper result has the problems.
Printing to a number of other (mainly inkjet) printers is fine.

I have tried downloading the latest driver from HP and still got the
problem. I even tried to use other drivers. Unfortunately this occurred in
the middle of a product launching conference on rented equipment, so I no
longer have the printer to test with. However I now live in fear of my users
reporting printing problems.

I expect RB to say "driver problem" but I am curious how preview should look
correct, but the paper output not. I can't buy every printer to test
physically!!! The HP 4 is also a mature product - anyone else had problems?

Sarah

digitalmetaphors

While minor variations between preview and printer output are to be
expected, the issues you're describing haven't really been encountered
before. Here's some information exmplaining why the two don't always match.
If you're able to reproduce the problem or know exactly which printer driver
you used we can test it here.

--
Cheers,

Alexander Kramnik
Digital Metaphors


-----------------------------------------------------
Article: Why Your Preview Won't Match Your Output
-----------------------------------------------------

We have two choices when we create a preview - compose for the screen, or
compose for the printer. Most programs such as MS Word compose to the screen
when they create a preview. This makes for attractive previews but they tend
to be inaccurate. And it means that they then compose again for the printer
when you print the document. Most of the time things will print effectively
similar to the preview, but we have seen many times when the printed output
was different - a word wrapped to the next line, or some such problem. If
you use a program meant for accurate page layout, such as PageMaker, you
will notice that the Page Setup dialog asks you for which printer you wish
to compose. When PageMaker displays a page, it may not look exactly how you
think it should, but you do get a preview where the element placement is
guaranteed to match the printed output's element placement. We have chosen
to follow this second model.

Note that when we say element placement, we are referring to X and Y
placement and not height and width. While the X and Y placement of our
previews will be accurate, the height and width of text elements may vary
based on zoom percentage. This is a normal artifact of composing for the
printer and not for the screen.

Your preview can not match your printed output. It will differ in one of two
ways:

1- It can look good on the screen, but items on the page may not display in
the same location they will when printed.
or
2- It can be less attractive, but items will display on the preview exactly
where they will when printed.

We give you the second because it is more accurate and more reliable. Not to
mention more in keeping with professional page layout products.

rbuser

Yes, I know that preview does not look exactly like printout, but the
problems I experienced were that the paper output did not look like it
should (and does on other printers). For example centered labels vanishing
off the right of the page.

But to reproduce the problem you will need the printer driver and physical
printer - just previewing with the driver will not show any faults, you have
to actually print on paper. Bummer!! By all means download the HP laserjet
4000 PCL 6 driver for XP from the HP site and test it out if you can. At
1.49MB I'm not going to attach it. And I tried the 5e version too with no
benefits. Unfortunately I don't own such a printer, I just rented one for a
week and had a lot of problems in public.

Perhaps a tiny clue lies in the fact that my reports size the width of
labels etc. dynamically using the page size in the onbeforeprint event. This
works fine on a variety of other printers, but maybe something is different
with this laserjet in the values returned between preview and print.

If you could look into this it would be a help.

Sarah

"Alexander Kramnik (Digital Metaphors)" wrote

rbuser

For completeness. The problem of centered labels vanishing off the right
hand side of the paper turned out not to be a printer problem. I finally
discovered that it was caused by setting the color of the font in the
report.beforeprint before setting the width of the label (I only did this on
non-color printers hence it looked printer specific). Why this is the case I
have no idea.

I still get repeated lines in ppTrichtext controls sometimes. The Adobe
Distiller (which uses the postsript driver) creates PDF from my reports with
repeated lines too. It is very sensitive to paper size and margin setting,
so I now suspect the richtext measurement and rendering is responsible
rather than the printer.

Questions that I have pursued in later threads, but HP 4 is probably
innocent after all.