Print Immediate versus Display and Print from Windows [DIFFERENT!]

[Mike Mackinnon]

Not sure if anyone has discovered the differences between between a BI Publisher result via print immediate or bringing up a submitted job and sending to printer.
I seem to be getting layout/spacing differences with the report. Has anyone seen this and is there a way to resolve these differences?

Thanks!

 

[JEMILLER]

Mike,
I can't give you a specific reason why there are differences. What I can say is that the print engine in those two cases is different. In the View PDF (in Adobe Reader) and Print case, Adobe Reader & the Windows print driver on the user's workstation is handling the printing. In the BIP Print Immediate case, the BIP PDF output is being run through code in convtops.jar to render to postscript and then through the server's printer subsystem. (If you are printing PCL then a convertToPCL filter DLL is being used. BIP doesn't fully support PCL conversion and logos and other graphical elements may be lost. I am assuming you are using PS printers.)

You may not be able to achieve identical results but in my experience you should be able to get close assuming all the components in the two print methods are aligned in terms of page size, scaling and printable area. My guess is that one or more of those settings are different somewhere in the chain between the local and server based printing.

 

[Mike Mackinnon]

Thanks.

I kind of figured it's probably some sort of windows versus JDE rending issue. It just seems a little weird that it's not like margins or something like that but my table size and rows/columns are different.
Anyway I think we're OK as they will be generally using Print Immediate so as long as they are consistent with ONE printing method I will be alright for layout.

 

[jileto]

Yes, the issue has been pestering for a while. Nothing you can do but put procedures in place to minimize it.

For example, we tell users to set up their PDF readers print settings to: no scaling, no auto-rotate, no auto-center. Also, we've set up BIP to use only 1 set of fonts - Arial Unicode MS - mainly because we're a multi-language shop.