How are people handling sliding/printing of text blocks

Classic Servoy
1

I’m a little stuck on how to handle printing a client solution. I’ve been around the forums culling info, but I can’t figure out a satisfactory solution. I’m hoping I’m missing something.

To summarize, the situation is: I have several different printout that require sliding areas of large text blocks (typically formatted as HTML). The text in these fields ranges from 1-2 paragraphs to a page or so of text.

Using Servoy 3 or greater, on Java 1.5 or 1.6…if I use HTML_AREAs for the content, the sliding works great and sizes properly and they look nice in PDFs, but the text is jumbled and kerned oddly when printed directly to the printer. It is my understanding that this is a Java issue which emerged in Java 1.5 and has not been fixed.

If I use label fields set to “use html”, the text looks great, but the sliding is not calculated properly when text wraps lines and the content is clipped.

These problems seem consistent regardless of the fonts I use, etc.

So, I’m stuck with no way to handle these that is satifactory to the client.

Help! What are others doing to get around these issues?

Thanks for any ideas, greg.

2

Well, a nice solution could be to use the jasper plugin.
That plug-in doesn’t show the issues.

3

I have the Jasper Reports plugin, and must admit I had high hopes but haven’t found the time to really work it into my solutions.

That said, I think it still would represent significant duplication of labor to use for this application. I have a lot of html calculation fields that are used to display on the reports that I would have to reproduce in Jasper, etc.

I’m also hoping it’s an issue that high on Servoy’s radar, because reliably printing is a pretty important feature for a db solution.

Right now, my workaround is simply to have users print to PDF as a preview and then print that – but I don’t like that as a long term solution.

greg.