Report Builder and Epson TM Till Printer

rbuser

Hi

I am using RB 9.x Enterprise ? ( I have RAP and DADE ) and I am trying to
write reports that will work for both a standard A4 printer and for a
Receipt Printer ( via a Windows driver ). So far, the A4 works a treat, but
how do get it to print correctly over the A4 length on an Till Printer, I
have tried the Roll Paper settings and that doesn't seem to work - All
attempts I have made result in the printout having 2 pages, where the
heading is printed on both and the paper is not cut until the end.

How do I get this to work ? The same report has to work on A4 printers (
lasers ) or any Till Printer with a Windows driver.

Thanks
Tony

nicocizik

Hi Tony,

First, where are you changing the PrinterSetup settings when you want to
change printers? Will this need to happen on the fly or perhaps will you be
printing a receipt and paper report simultaneously?

Take a look at the following article on printing to a continuous paper
printer. It may give you some clues on how to set up your report.

----------------------------------------------------
Article: Printing to Continuous Paper
----------------------------------------------------

1. Layout

For continuous printing (for example a receipt) use Title/Summary and
removing the Header/Footer. Set the PrintHeight of each to phDynamic. Layout
the DetailBand to print a single line item. Set the margins to 0 or to the
smallest that the printer driver will support (some printers have an
unprintable area).

With this configuration The Report will generate a Title followed by a
variable number of Detail bands that span pages if needed, and then finally
print a Summary at the end.

2. Pagination

a. dtPrinter

Some printer drivers have a continuous paper size setting. If not then try
setting the paper size to be very small - perhaps the size of the tallest
band in the layout. Or try setting the page height to be the size of a
detail band. Note that some printer drivers will only accept page sizes
within a certain range of paper sizes.

b. dtReportTextFile

With the above layout, the report text file will generate the page breaks
properly, however the device will fill up a page with blank lines. You can
control the number of lines per page by configuring the CharacterGrid
property in the Report.BeforePrint event:

example:


procedure TForm1.ppReport1BeforePrint(Sender: TObject);
var
lDevice: TppReportTextFileDevice;
begin

if (ppReport1.FileDevice <> nil) and (ppReport1.FileDevice is
TppReportTextFileDevice)then
begin
lDevice := TppReportTextFileDevice(ppReport1.FileDevice);

{120 characters per line, 66 lines per page}
lDevice.CharacterGrid(120, 66);
end;

end;

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com