On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Jerry Neff wrote:
> Terry, you received an impressive response to your inquiry. I am
> looking for a way to display tax forms, with data, to the web where
> users can print their own form once logged into their account. For us
> emailing, printing and mailing are too costly.
If I understand correctly, you're looking at a situation where the user
has only a web browser with which to access your system, and you want to
deliver precise print output. You most likely have no control over, or
even knowledge of, what kind of printer they have.
You certainly can't rely on the printing capabilities of the browser. Do I
need to support that statement?
There are really only two ways to do that: a) PDF generation, and b)
client-side code. I'll discuss both.
a) PDF generation
A PDF has the benefit of portability (that's what the P is for). Adobe
Reader is available on a variety of platforms, users can view as well as
print, and it can print very reliably on virtually any printer. You can
generate PDFs on demand, using a variety of software tools, but it isn't
necessarily easy, especially from a legacy programming environment. Adding
form images complicates matters.
b) Client-side code
A piece of code running on the client's machine, such as a browser add-in
or an ActiveX object, has the advantage of having closely-coupled access
to the user's printer. It knows how big the paper is, and how much of the
page the printer can print on. If it gets "told" to print something
precisely, it can do so.
As you might guess, we have solutions available for both scenarios, as
follows:
a) Print Wizard as a PDF generator
Our Print Wizard software can run on any Windows platform, and take as
input a text file with a (optionally) a few HTML-like markup tags. You
would also tell PW to use a particular file as an overlay. And finally,
you tell PW that its output should be a PDF with a certain name.
So in a nutshell, PW provides a high-level interface to PDF generation.
b) Web Print Object (WePO)
WePO is an ActiveX object that can be download-installed onto users' PCs,
if they are running IE on Windows. You then build a web page to contain
the object and tell it what to print. When the user clicks the Print
button (presented by the object), WePO fetches a specified report file and
a specified overlay from your server, and prints the output on the user's
printer. The report file and the overlay file are as described in a)
above.
Demos of all this are available on our website. Feel free to contact me
for help in understanding what we offer.
Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen, President, Rasmussen Software, Inc.
personal e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
company e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
fax: (US) 503-624-0760
web: http://www.anzio.com
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