PostScript Printing Issues Frequently Asked Questions

Printing on UNIX with Oracle Reports 10-31 1. In Oracle Reports Builder, double-click the field in the Paper Design or Paper Layout view to display the Property Inspector. 2. Find the Horizontal Elasticity property. 3. If it is set to Fixed, you should change it to Variable or Expand. 4. Run the report to the printer. 5. If it still truncates, it could be that the field requires multiple lines. 6. Return to the Property Inspector for the field and check its Vertical Elasticity. 7. If it is set to Fixed, you should change it to Variable or Expand. 8. Run the report to the printer again. ■ If the right most fields on the page are always the ones truncating, it could be an issue with the printable area of the printer. If you are using a PCL printer, then you will have to estimate the size of the printable area and resize your margins accordingly: 1. Open the report in Oracle Reports Builder. 2. Go to the Paper Layout view. 3. Click the Margin tool on the top tool bar. A thick black line appears indicating where the body of your report ends and the margin begins. 4. Click and drag the black line to the left approximately 0.5 inches. 5. Save and run the report to the printer again. 6. If necessary, repeat steps 4 and 5 to determine approximately where the printable area boundary is located and then ensure that your report body fits within that area. ■ If you are using a PostScript printer, you can get the printable area boundary to appear in the Paper Layout view as follows: 1. Open the report in Oracle Reports Builder.

2. Choose File Page Setup.

3. Verify that the margins are small and that the orientation is correct.

4. Click OK. The Paper Layout view should now be able to read the boundary.

5. Go to the Paper Layout view. 6. Click the Margin tool on the top tool bar. A thick black line appears indicating where the body of your report ends and the margin begins. A black hashed line also appears indicating the boundary of the printable area. 7. Ensure that the thick black line is inside of the black hashed line. If it is not, click and drag the black line inside the printable area. 8. Click the Margin tool to leave margin mode. 9. If necessary, reposition your fields to fit within the new body boundaries. 10. Save and run the report to the printer. ■ For PCL, if it is still truncating, try using a fixed space font instead of a proportional font. Sometimes PCL printers have problems interpreting proportional space fonts and it leads to truncation. You should try using a fixed space font, such as Courier, and possibly font aliasing. 10-32 Publishing Reports to the Web with Oracle Reports Services See Also: Chapter 9, Managing Fonts in Oracle Reports for more font-related information. Note: Default layouts are built against a generic printer. Each printer has its own printable area. As a result, you may have to reset the report to fit the printer. Ideally, if you know the various printers you will be using, you can design the report from the start to fit the printer with the smallest printable area. 11 Using PDF in Oracle Reports 11-1 11 Using PDF in Oracle Reports Adobe Portable Document Format PDF is a universal file format that preserves all the fonts, formatting, graphics, and color, of any source document regardless of the application and platform used to create it. Oracle Reports was one of the first report generation tools to embrace this technology and generate quality PDF documents. This chapter contains the following main sections: ■ What’s New In This Release? ■ PDF Features Included in Oracle Reports ■ Generating a Unicode PDF File ■ Generating a Bidirectional BiDi PDF File ■ Generating a Multibyte PDF File ■ Generating a Barcode PDF File 11.1 What’s New In This Release? Oracle Reports 11g Release 1 11.1.1 provides significant font handling enhancements, as outlined in Table 11–1 a subset of Table 1–1, 11g Functionality vs. 10g Functionality : Table 11–1 11g Font Features vs. 10g Functionality 11g New Features Equivalent 10g Functionality Cross-platform support for TrueType Fonts TTF and TrueType Collections TTC. Report output is in most cases identical on UNIX as on Windows, allowing for simplified cross-platform deployment. Oracle Reports reads the font metrics from the appropriate TTF files to correctly format the report output. This eliminates the issue of text misalignment due to font metrics mismatches. Fonts for which TTF files are available are found automatically. Note that if a TTF font file is not found, then the font lookup mechanism reverts to the pre-11g implementation. New environment variables REPORTS_ ENHANCED_FONTHANDLING and REPORTS_FONT_DIRECTORY . Possible mismatches between fonts in report output on UNIX and Windows due to different font mechanisms on Windows and UNIX. Font aliasing was required, along with PDF font subsetting. Support for older font file types for example, AFM supported. Difficult to get these font types for all fonts. Conversion of TTF to AFM required in many cases, but even these files did not provide the exact output as on Windows.