Dear R:Base folks
I CAN"T believe there is not a simple solution to
this ridiculous problem Frank Conroy and I ran into this week in installing a
conversion and enhancement of an R:Base for DOS application to R:Base for
Windows.
Working with Frank, Karen Tellef and William
Mason, we have set up a slick inventory control system for a company that is
in the TRANSFER business. They are at the fish pier in Boston, and their
facility consists of a large refrigerated warehouse space with many truck
bays. Trucks are pulling up all day (and night sometimes) with loads of fresh
or frozen fish, which stay very little time in the facility before they are
shipped out again. Four salespeople work their butts off in a cramped
little office at the edge of the warehouse entering orders and printing out
bills of lading. THey are harrassed all day by truckers impatiently
waiting for their paper work so they can get on the road. The pace is
very fast; to accomodate this, they purchased a high speed Lexmark 370 printer
which when printing in Draft mode prints 700 or so characters per second. When
the application ran in DOS, all four of them could be entering and printing
these bills of lading (on pre printed forms with carbons) nonstop and the
printer would be printing them so fast that by the time they pressed [Enter]
and got up from their chairs to walk the four steps to the printer, despite
the high volume and four stations sending bills all day, the bill of lading
was done and sitting there waiting to be torn off.
Monday, we installed the new system, where we had
put little attention on this bill of lading as a minor and easy report and put
attention instead on the very complex inventory control system, and bar coding
application we were implementing.
IMMEDIATELY, we learned about the Achille's Heel
effect. The bill of lading report was suddenly taking so long to print
(25 - 30 seconds per for the simplest one item bill) that they were backed up
to the point where they didn't get out of work Monday, a very busy day, till 1
AM. We MUST speed up this printing by Friday or they are going to go
back to the DOS app until we can figure it out.
Here's the details:
Four PC's, running Windows 98.
Windows 2000 is the server system
All printing goes to a Lexmark 370
Printer.
All printing cycles through a PC which IS very
slow, just a Pentium.
The Lexmark has four fonts built into
it:
Fast Draft, at 700 CPS
Draft, at 630 CPS
Courier and Gothic letter quality at
150 CPS
Tech support at Lexmark suggested we use a font
in R:Base that matched one of the built in fonts. For now, the best we
have been able to do has been by:
* Using Century Gothic Regular 10
font
* Under Windows print manager, setting the
print settings to print coarse text, graphics at the simplest
resolution
* Using a PRNSETUP "printer name" command
in the R:Base for WIndow program for this printer followed by an OUTPUT
PRINTER command
The result is that as each new BOL prints, you
can watch the printer take 5-6 seconds "setting up", then about another 9
seconds to print the simplest of the BOL's. Clearly, it's printing at
the 150 CPS speed. Originally, the printer WAS printing a line, then
cycling back to the left before starting again. With the changes we
figured out, at least it now prints left to right, next line right to left,
and so on, hence the cutting the time in half. (The ideal, which
they had under DOS, was NO delay on starting and maybe 3 seconds to print
even a complex BOL) On the more complex BOL's, something wierd
happens. The report is based on a detail table, with many rows sometimes
per bill. To save paper, the report prints as a group header the lot
number and item name (eg, Lot 142 Cod) and then creates in a footer a list of
the weights of the individual boxes (sometimes as many as 100) as a long text
string with commas between them which wraps onto several lines to print the
weights of the boxes being shipped from that lot. In DOS, as in R:Base
for Windows, the report CREATION is very fast. In DOS, the PRINTING is
also very fast, with each line printing right out. In WIndows, these
individual lines of weights cause a second or so delay between the
lines! The sales reps and truckers are losing patience
fast.
In addition to the above we have
tried:
* Printing to a file; the report doesn't
print correctly and the printer still doesn't use the draft font when we TYPE
it out.
Frank's had a brilliant idea for a temporary fix
to stave off the wolves which we will be trying today / tomorrow: In WIndows
app, don't print, just flag a row in the bill of lading table as ready for
printing (such a column already exists and is indexed). Then create a
little DOS program that will connect to the database and in a constant loop
look for rows in the table where status = ready to print, and print the
BOL.
We will try this and hope it works. But I can't
believe that we can't get R:Base for Windows to print to a high speed dot
matrix printer in fast draft mode!!!!! SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE must be doing
this!
Any and all ideas are welcome!
Thanks
David Blocker
