Printing weirdness!

Hi

I know this is going to sound crazy but…

In my solution i am getting occasional print errors reported from my users regarding missing item codes and descriptions from invoice and report prints.

After some investigation i found that any stock codes or description starting with the letter “w” will either not print correctly or at all!!

I can reproduce this consistently and can fix it by putting a different letter or symbol in front of the item code!! (i know this was going to sound crazy)

All reports and printouts preview correctly and you can see these on screen with correct formatting, it only seems a print issue. If i create a pdf of the report/invoice everything seems fine.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Using Servoy 2.25 AND MySQL 5.0.18 for data and repository server

When you really can reproduce this is a sample solution I would file it as a bug.

It sounds as thought the ‘w’ is seen as some sort of escape character.

Sure it is not you doing this somewhere? 9:10 creating a small sample solution either resolves the issue or will, in the end, help the dev team a great deal!

I know this doesn’t help but I really don’t know anything else to say :?

Thanks Marcel

I have since tried playing around with a different collation/character set in MySQL but this also has no affect.

Will try a simpler solution as you suggest and see if this has the same result.

Thanks for your help.

Time ago one of my customer reported the same problem!.
He only had one item with code starting with “w” and that code was not printed!.
I was never able to reproduce the problem on my printers so I assumed was a problem with his windows drivers.
btw… they changed the code of the item ;)
Maybe you can test on a different printer?

Thanks Enrico

We have already had this reported from a number of installations all with different printers.

Glad to know i’m not the only one.

Understand that this fixed the issue for you however i am going to get some strange looks from my clients if i tell them not to use “w” as the first letter of a item code as it won’t print this!

Were you using MySQL?

Hello Rodney

You are not alone. I recognized the same issue here and I’ve reported it to Servoy a couple of months ago. No solution available until yet :? .

rodneysieb:
Understand that this fixed the issue for you however i am going to get some strange looks from my clients if i tell them not to use “w” as the first letter of a item code as it won’t print this!

I’ve been lucky, I would have never dared to suggest a solution like that either… they “hard” solved the issue without asking me… just commented the problem afterwards as a funny thing

rodneysieb:
Were you using MySQL?

No, postrgres/linux server/ windows clients. Will go to my customer by the end of november and make a couple of tests and see if I can have a micro-solution showing the problem

After some investigation i found that any stock codes or description starting with the letter “w” will either not print correctly or at all!!

I blame Bush. :wink:

I’d love to blame Wush, i mean Bush.

Hi,
I have just confirmed the same problem, I have a client using a erp solution, and yes whenever a “W” is in the printed form, the print output is all messed up.

Regards
Phil Routley (Worldview iT)

Hi Phil

Have noticed that if the data is formatted as a “tagged” label this does not occur, only seems to occur if you are using the direct dataprovider in a field.

If they print as a pdf file it will be correct. Which may be a short term fix. i highly recommend pdf creator, its free and works very well.

I have not tested if this bug exists in v3 yet . This does need to be sorted out by the servoy people however.

rodneysieb:
…If they print as a pdf file it will be correct. Which may be a short term fix. i highly recommend pdf creator, its free and works very well…

Even better, user the Servoy PDF plugin. It works great and is server-side so clients do not have to install.

I have also experienced the “w” problem.

I think this all is related to printing in java 1.5 in general!
indeed, if you use a w or some other letters, you see all kind of font-kerning issues.

Try for example the new CRM demo. print an order in the smart-client
Now open a webclient and print the same order there. (pdf is produced) and print this pdf to the same printer.

in the bottom, you see all a text message, with all kinds of font-kerning.

I have reported this issues, over a year ago, but there is nothing that Servoy can do about it. Jan Blok has worked is ass :o off to workaround this problem, so now lables don’t have the font-kerning issues anymore. But he could’nt fix it for fields. So use for printing: labels!!
In our case, we use growing fields in a print,(Text-area labels don’t grow) so we HAVE to print to the pdf plugin, for nice results. :-(

here is the bugreport by sun:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bu … id=5097047

please subscribe and vote for this one!

Hi Westy

I use servoy pdf plugin as well as the pdfcreator driver. The advantage to me with a pdfcreator driver (free) is that i can preview the page as i normally would before printing and then print to pdf with absolutely no programming. no need to do pdf preview in media fields ever, and my clients want to preview all reports before printing.

This is obviously not a simple bug fix for servoy and i understand the situation a lot better. Thanks to all who posted.

Hi Harjo

Understand you post but this only happens if the dataprovider starts with “w” if i put another character as the first letter (or even a space) this issue disappears. Again, very odd!

rodneysieb:
Hi Harjo

Understand you post but this only happens if the dataprovider starts with “w” if i put another character as the first letter (or even a space) this issue disappears. Again, very odd!

Try it with java 1.4.2, and you will see! :wink:

It will be interesting to watch how java develops now that it is being made available as open source code!