Evaluating...need help

rbuser

I am trying to use your report engine to create a report for a receipt
printer for a POS application. I need it to print out a customer receipt at
the end of the sale. For years I have done this writing straight to the
printer but then if I have more data than the printer buffer can handle it
is lost so I am needing to find a new method to do this. Is there a simple
way that I can design the report using your product and just have it print
like a normal windows report except it goes to a receipt printer? We use CBM
1000 Thermal receipt printers as well as Epson TM-U200 dot matrix printers
and are programming in D7. Any help would be great.

nicocizik

Hi Trevor,

Check out the following article on printing to continuous paper. It may be
of some help.

----------------------------------------------------
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