I've done this experience:
The commands
OUTPUT LPT1
PRINT reportname .....
send output to Windows print manager and spooling (very slow)
otherwise the commads:
OUTPUT LPT1:
PRINT reportname ...
(note ":" after LPT1)
send output directly to the printer bypassing Windows control. (very fast,
like DOS)
Hope this help
Daniele
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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
