Printing reports on dot matrix printers
In order to print reports on dot matrix printers first you need to design your report so it can be rendered as text then you need to install the " Generic / Text Only" printer driver on the user's computer.
Designing reports for rendering as text
Designing reports for rendering as text must take into consideration the limitations of the output format. This rendering mode supports only a subset of the features supported by the RDL.
Supported features:
- Tables: columns, spanning values on multiple columns, rows and limited support for border rendering
- Paginating: limited support just add "Page X" at the end of each page, standard paginating support is not available (variables numPages? of currentPage? will always be 1)
- Text boxes in header and footer: limited support
Fitting report to page
Fitting the report to page requires knowing the page width and height in characters (dependent on the target printer). This is controlled using two report parameters CharacterWidth for width and LinesPerPage for height.
CharacterWidth specifies to the renderer how to transform the widths of columns, text boxes etc. from pixels to characters (as required by the printer). Set this parameter in trials until you obtain the desired width of page for your report. By default this parameter is set to 4.5 pixels.
LinesPerPage is the number of lines within one page, the renderer prints rows until it reaches the value of this parameter and then changes the page number. If the page number changes in the middle of a table and the table's header is marked as repeatable on each page, then the header is repeated before continuing with the rows. By default this parameter is set to 100 lines per page.
The parameters can be exposed to the user or can be set with default values by the designer.
Installing the printer
To install the "Generic / Text" only printer driver follow this tutorial:
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