Updated on 6/30/2004: Finishing my thoughts
The simple, one-off report for the Delphi app has turned into a real PITA.
The report looks great...prints just fine on the client printers and my printer. The client had one request...they wanted to be able to re-print the reports. Well...the app was just NOT designed to do this, so we reached a compromise. The client said “Can you create a .prn file that we can keep around in case they want to reprint? The users will know what to do with it.” No problem, or so I thought.
I had to hit EBay to find the Delphi RAD Pack so I could get the VCL source. I modified printers.pas to accept a filename. Everything worked. The .prn file was created, the hard-copy was printed, everything was great until the client emailed me saying “all we get when we try to reprint is garbage.” Turns out, they were opening the .prn file in Word...ugh.
I explained to them that a .prn file is binary and they could reprint by copying the file to the printer (I supplied them with the DOS commands to do so).
Anyway...on my Win 3.1 (running inside Microsoft Virtual PC), the .prn file is created. For them, no file is created. I'm at a loss, so now I'm hacking in another print routine that will actually create an ascii version of the report.
Print | posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 9:30 AM