Access 2002: special printer settings in reports

[Thiemo Sammern]

Hi

I have a report that needs special printer driver settings to print
correctly. To be more specific: the report ist set to "special printer"
"FinePrint pdfFactory" and in the pdfFactory driver I set the "Show Dialog
after Printing" to "NO" to make Access print the report silently.

In Access 2000 this worked perfectly well. In Access 2002 these driver
settings don't seem to get stored with the report any more. Even worse:
when I change settings in the printer driver in the report + save the
report Access discards not only these driver settings but my printer
selection, too and switches back to default printer.

Office XP SP 2 is installed. I also tried the same with a different
printer driver (HP Business InkJet 2280; set "paper quality" to e.g. "HP
Premium paper") and noticed the same behaviour. It doesn't seem to be a
privilege issue because I tried it being administrator as well as being
domain user.

It seems that this behaviour only occurs for printer settings that are not
mapped in the report's "printer" object (which is basically the Windows
DevMode collection of printer attributes). Therefore settings like
"orientation", "paper size" etc. work, other more driver specific ones
(see above) don't.

I haven't found a description of this problem in the KB.

Can anybody help?

Any help is appreciated.

TIA

Thiemo

 

[SA]

Thiemo:

Access Xp works a bit differently than Access 2000 as you've found, but in
most cases in working with printers, the extended settings do get saved with
the report. The issue with pdfFactory is that it doesn't really save many
of those extended settings in a true devmode (which is what the report
actually saves, the devmode can extend well beyond the actual Windows
defined settings, incorporating driver specific settings), rather pdfFactory
writes those settings out to various registry entries and queries those when
the printer is called, which is likely the root of your problem.

There are two ways to address this. You can write out the reg settings
pdfFactory requires prior to calling your report (see their web)f. If you
don't want to take all the time and effort to work all that out, you might
check out our PDF and Mail Library for Access which allows you to output
your report using pdfFactory to a specific file, without a prompt quite
easily with very little code as in:

Dim objPDF As New PDFClass
Const PDF_Engine_pdfFactory = 4
With objPDF
.ReportName = "Your Report"
.OutputFile = "c:\somedir\somefile.pdf"
.PDFEngine = PDF_Engine_pdfFactory
.PrintImage
End With

You'll find it on our web http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/attac-cg

Steve Arbaugh
MS Access MVP

 

[Thiemo Sammern]

Hi Steve

Thanks for the link. I'll take a look at it.

I solved the problem in the meantime by setting values in the registry
before printing the report and changing the setting back to the original
values after printing has finished.

Of course a library that does that for me would have saved me some
headaches.

Thanks!

Thiemo

Thiemo:

Access Xp works a bit differently than Access 2000 as you've found, but
in [...]

check out our PDF and Mail Library for Access which allows you to output
your report using pdfFactory to a specific file, without a prompt quite
easily with very little code as in:

Dim objPDF As New PDFClass
Const PDF_Engine_pdfFactory = 4
With objPDF
.ReportName = "Your Report"
.OutputFile = "c:\somedir\somefile.pdf"
.PDFEngine = PDF_Engine_pdfFactory
.PrintImage
End With

You'll find it on our web http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/attac-
cg

Steve Arbaugh
MS Access MVP