Rev drives me crazy sometimes - this time printing

Jan Schenkel janschenkel at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 13 01:07:46 EST 2008


--- Bill Vlahos <bvlahos at mac.com> wrote:
> I'm printing a card from a Rev 3 standalone that
> works fine on the  
> Mac. On Windows the text is converted to all UPPER
> CASE and the Page  
> Setup window seems really archaic (cassette,
> continuous autofeed, etc.)
> 
> The systemPrintSelector is true.
> 
> Here is the code:
>   case "Print Window..."
>           answer printer as sheet
>           if the result is not "Cancel" then
> 	            print this card
>           end if
>        break
> 
> Any idea what is going on?
> 
> Bill Vlahos
> 

I'm not sure about the archaic printer selection
window - I thought Revolution just called the standard
printing dialog box API, though maybe they're using a
trusty old Win32 call which has been superseded with
another command in Windows XP or Vista.

As for the uppercasing, I'm not sure I have a good
explanation either. Since this is on Windows, you may
be bitten by a side effect of the difference between
screen and print fonts on that OS, which you can
counteract by setting the 'formatForPrinting' property
of your stack to true.

To save you some time, here's my advice on that
property:
- always print from a separate stack, where the user
doesn't input data into directly
- layout the stack, adding graphics, images and fields
- set the 'formatForPrinting' of that stack to true,
save to disk and then use the 'Close and remove from
memory' option to make sure Rev forgets all about it
(or you can just quit Rev)
- now when you need to print, your script just opens
that stack, fills in the fields and then prints the
stack (the stack doesn't even have to be visible to
print it so you can make this smooth for your
end-user)

Follow this principle, and your texts should come out
in the proper style, size and location. Note that I've
heard that with font sizes 9 or smaller, this may
still give funky results - but I like to print things
that people can read without a magnifying glass ;-)

HTH,

Jan Schenkel.

Quartam Reports & PDF Library for Revolution
<http://www.quartam.com>

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)


      



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