Printing a report to file
Hi,
We have a strange situation at a customer of ours. We are printing the same report to the same printer but through a thin client and an IP port instead of a local printer through USB and the report is wrongly sized. It no longer fits on the label. The printer is a label printer.
What we like to do is to capture the binary information that is send to the printer into a file so we can show that the software on our side does not change the output when using either configuration. We already done this through the print to file option as the output port of the printer driver (which have different binary files as expected) but we would like to rule out that it is the software that has changed the report instead of the printer driver/pc configuration/windows/etc.
Is there a means to capture the binary data as being send to the windows driver into a file?
Thanks,
Paul Michael.
We have a strange situation at a customer of ours. We are printing the same report to the same printer but through a thin client and an IP port instead of a local printer through USB and the report is wrongly sized. It no longer fits on the label. The printer is a label printer.
What we like to do is to capture the binary information that is send to the printer into a file so we can show that the software on our side does not change the output when using either configuration. We already done this through the print to file option as the output port of the printer driver (which have different binary files as expected) but we would like to rule out that it is the software that has changed the report instead of the printer driver/pc configuration/windows/etc.
Is there a means to capture the binary data as being send to the windows driver into a file?
Thanks,
Paul Michael.
Comments
Have you looked into "data traffic monitoring" tools available on the Interweb?
A quick google found a lot of free / free-to-try stuff for capturing data flows to IP addresses. I'm sure you could craft a better search with your knowledge of the problem.
You said "thin client" but I'm not sure I understand the "architecture" of your set up. Which device do you mean is the Client, and which is the Server? Is the printer driver on the system running FastReports or the device to which the printer is connected? (Or both?) What I mean is, is the printer driver before or after the IP transport layer?
[aside]
We have a set-up here where the printers / scanners / card-readers connect to a USB-hub that connects to our local network (with a fixed IP address), so any computer on the network can share these usually single-user devices. Not wildly sophisticated but fine for low-volume, small business. In our case the user PCs each have the necessary device drivers, which are bog-standard Canon / Epson etc., and the hub is effectively passive, apart from providing the control to ensure only one user is linked to the devices at any time. Never had any trouble with our FastReport applications printing this way. And reports exported to PDF print exactly the same as directly printed reports (under FR v5.5.11 - there were problems with PDF rendering several moons ago).
[/aside]
Cheers, Paul
Have you tried saving the preview to an FP3 file, which is in XML? I'm not sure where in the chain that is emitted, but it may be late enough to show differences if the two environments are using different default printers or paper sizes or something.