[archive] Printing and Preview

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

pprevw2 works great..

Thanks
SR

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Thanks to Matt for all his help. I have been discussing things with Matt via email and have come to the following issues for all to read and have input to:
1. It works great for simple text reports.
2. It can't cope with win$print commands
3. The acubench preview seems to have missing functionality - background image as an example - so before I go any further, does anyone know what HTML limitations this preview has?
4. What does the HELP key on the Acubench preview window do? I get nothing at all
5. Does anyone know the full list of parameters that can be passed to the acubench preview program?

Keith

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Originally posted by Micr35180

2. It can't cope with win$print commands

This is because it uses Internet Explorer print facility. From Acubench perspective, there is no such thing as a spooler, and without a spooler, nor can any win$printer manipulation take place. Hiding this information is by design from Microsoft.

3. The acubench preview seems to have missing functionality

I have not tried this, but the whole consept of the Acubench printing is that the COBOL application writes HTML to disk and this HTML is then loaded by the browser. I would anticipate that you should be able to embedd html which links in any image of your choice, using whatever styles allowed by html. You just have to provide the file and the hmtl that loads it. In short, is it valid html, then it should be accepted, as it is Internet Explorer running it.

Apart of this, if you want to have "watermark" printing using the standard windows spooler, this can be accomplished and we also have examples of this.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Thank you to mpcsoft for contributing to the forum with this.

Gisle

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Thank you to mpcsoft for contributing to the forum with this.

Gisle

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

My pleasure!

matt c

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Gisle

I attach a simple report file that was put into the VIEW02 program from Matt. The background JPG does not display. When opened in Explorer if shows the background OK

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

I really don't know. I figure you should try tech support on that.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

I really don't know. I figure you should try tech support on that.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

mpcsoft .. could you zip the complete project or your samples and make it an attachment.

Txs

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

I downloaded the zip file and opened the html page. The html has a hard coded path for the jpg

c:\\am2000\\amaster\\bitmaps\\h24lh.jpg

If that directory does not exist with the appropriate file nothing will show.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Try using fineprint.com, pdfactory.com, there isn't any programming involved, they install as a windows printer, and the demo is actually the live component, with some advertising that prints and displays, other than that, its works great. I use it all the time for development.

http://www.fineprint.com

PS Get the pro version of Pdfactory.

Good Luck....

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 21 December 2005]

All I want pleaseeeee is a simple method of taking my old cobol print programs and to be able to do a print preview, or to be able to show the report in a screen window prior to printing. The actual windows printing facilities are fine and the conversion has been simple (i.e. DOS to Windows), but the lack of real windows facilities with the printing options is very constraining.

I have looked briefly at a myriad of .pdf printer drivers but none give a simple (almost command line) to circumvent the dialogue box they all seem to insist on putting up for filename etc.

I am not keen to go to Crystal as a lot of work in changing all the native reporting programs, and without using a direct cobol data to crystal reader then i introduce the ODBC overhead.

Can anyone help here, or is Acucorp going to address this soon?

Keith

Try using fineprint.com, pdfactory.com, there isn't any programming involved, they install as a windows printer, and the demo is actually the live component, with some advertising that prints and displays, other than that, its works great. I use it all the time for development.

http://www.fineprint.com

PS Get the pro version of Pdfactory.

Good Luck....