Printing Techniques
Description
Techniques for layout out fields and lines in reports, including suppressing space and handling data that spans multiple lines or pages.
- Name
- Description
- Printing Images
The default Display Mode for image files on reports is "Absolute". This mode prints one picture pixel per printer pixel. The result will typically produce a print image smaller than you desire.
- Printing Images in Reports
Images stored in a database can be displayed in a report. This includes images stored as blob, base64, or image file reference fields as well as SVG and Ink data. Composite images can also be generated from picutre and ink data and shown in a report.
- Keeping Things Together on a Page
There are two basic ways in which you can control where page breaks occur: You can set properties for individual sections and edit regions, and you can insert page breaks and conditional page breaks. By setting section and edit region properties, you can set rules to control the locations of page breaks. For example, by checking the Keep together on page check box in the Detail Properties dialog box, you can prevent individual records from being split. When Alpha Anywhere arrives at a record that will not fit on the page, the entire record is carried over to the second page, as shown in the following diagram:
- Inserting a Page Break
There are two types of page breaks you can use, a hard page break and a soft page break. A hard page break always causes a page break to occur. For example, if you want to use the Report Header edit region as a cover page for the Report, you can put a hard page break at the end of the edit region to cause the Report to start the next edit region on the following page.
- Suppressing Blank Space on a Report
Alpha Anywhere lets you automatically suppress blank space at the end of each report section. Normally, if you define a report section of a certain height, the report will print using that size.
- Embedding Fonts in Reports
If a PDF Report is opened on a device that does not have the font used to generate the PDF Report, the Report will not render as expected. To fix this, 'Embed fonts' must be enabled in the PDF options.
- Growable Vertical Lines
Vertical lines in Free-form Reports can be configure to "grow", allowing them to extend to the full height of the report section containing the vertical line.
- Overview of Print Functions
Alpha Anywhere allows you to print and preview all layout types under Xbasic control. In addition, you can specify custom toolbars and menus for the print preview window. You can also use Xbasic to specify the printer driver to use, and if you are printing to file, you can use Xbasic to specify the output filename.
- PDF Printing via Microsoft XPS Printer Driver Web Project Properties
The Microsoft XPS printer driver can be used as an alternative to generate reports.
- Vertical Lines on Reports
Have you ever wanted to create an invoice or purchase order that has vertical lines separating the columns? This might sound easy at first, but how do you get every invoice to appear the same when the number of records varies from one to another? Using the old adage, "Necessity is the Mother of Invention," I was forced to come up with something for a customer. Since I would never know how many records might be in the child table (1), I couldn't just put a border on each field (limiting the border to right and left only). This would give me inconsistent results.