I'm looking to print reports from a rails 4 web app to a dot matrix printer.
I tried exporting to a text file and printing it, but no luck.. i.e. it did not look, feel and behave the same.
The rationale for doing this is printing large reports quickly using existing infrastructure that the client has.
Appreciate any help I can get......
Thanks!
Related
I want to make a program in lua where I put the user puts several inputs and then press on a button and all these inputs are then printed in a certain format in a paper, How do I physically print a paper in lua ?
Accessing a physical printer and sending it a file to print is fairly complicated and is beyond the scope of what I've done with Lua so far, but I would suggest checking out this forum post.
Your best option might be to save the stuff you want to print to a text file (such as a PDF using a Lua to PDF library, there are several available with a Google Search, such as this one by cpressey or this one by jung-kurt) and then using C++ or some other language to send that file to a physical printer and print it. Microsoft has a pretty decent guide on how to do that.
Hopefully you find this helpful, have a great weekend!
I want to build a website where people can create tests with questions and answers . I want people can type in math equation/symbol and equations in a textbox or something like that, and they will be store in database, it'also displayed on the web like image.
My idea is i will store the text user input in latex syntax and store it, then display it using MathJax, i don't know it's possible or will have better way to do this.
And a problem is in user input will have normal text with "math text" (latex), so how can i separate them and only save the latex text? Please give me some idea or suggest the way to solve it, thanks.
p/s: i'm building this site in ruby on rails, i found the gem mathjax-rails but it seem not working.
Consider building off Gollum. It is the backend for the wiki system Github uses and works fairly well with LaTex equations (currently their is a very irritating bug with less/greater than symbols, but is documented and likely will be fixed in the next release). I start using it this summer to take notes in a math classes, an example of a full page of rendered LaTex equations notes is here here.
Note: You must be logged into Github in order for the equation to render.
I am re-engineering a windows application to be ported to web. One area that has been worrying is 'printing'.
The application is data intensive and complex reports need to be generated. The erstwhile windows application takes advantage of printer APIs and extends sophisticated control to the users. It supports functions like page break, avoiding printing on printed parts of the sheet (like letterhead), choice of layouts and orientation, etc. Please note that these setting are not done only while printing, they are part of report definition sometimes.
From what I know, we cannot have this kind of control while printing web pages. I am in a process of identifying options at my disposal. While I prefer to first look into something that will help me print from raw web pages, following are other thoughts:
Since reports can also be exported to .xls & .pdf versions, let user download one and print directly. This however limits my solution to the area of application that have export feature.
Use Silverlight (4.0) for report layout definition and print. I think Silverlight 4.0 (in beta right now) provides adequate control over the printer. I have so far been avoiding the need of any RIA plugin.
Meticulously generate reports on web with fixed dimensions. I am not sure how far this will go.
Please share practices that can be applied easily in my scenario.
For reporting in the past on the web, using .NET, I like to generate PDF, Excel, Word or CSV files. I really like iTextSharp which allows for creating of PDF's.
Word can accept HTML, so that is usually quote easy. For more control you can get into the Word interops http://nishantrana.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/creating-word-document-using-c/, but they left me frustrated. Not for implementation, but I felt the clean up was poor.
CSV are great for raw data dumps and that is it.
For HTML, you can get nice control using a style sheet targeted to print media. There are just certain things you cannot control, like browser header and footer.
Flash also has better print controls than plain HTML, though you might not know it since these features are rarely used by flash developers. Almost everyone should have Flash installed these days, so it's not like Silverlight where there's a good chance of someone needing to install a plugin (doubly so for a beta version). I am not sure how the Flash printer APIs compare to Silverlight's printer APIs and if they give you the level of control you need, but their documentation is public so you can look into it.
Also I think exporting to PDF is a good idea. I don't see why you can't extend this to cover all places that would need to print a report. Basically instead of printing directly from the windows app running on their desktop, the same exact code runs on your server and generates a PDF that they can then print themselves.
I don't think you're going to have much luck trying to do it with raw HTML unfortunately. For one of our clients, we went with the "generate PDF" route and it worked out quite well. PDFs have the additional advantage that you don't have to print them out: you can just email them to the boss/accountant/whatever saving a bit of paper.
PDF is the way to go, if you want absolute control over printed output. As bonus, you can also provide the option to download PDFs in your application.
With HTML, you are at the mercy of user's browser settings for page size, margin and how page breaks will be handled.
Is there anyone that could give some proper guideness in Printing Reports (e.g. XtraReports)
in Dot Matrix Printers? Or any information printing in Dot Matrix Printers. Can i just print the report as i could print in InkJet/Laser printers? Should i use Stream to LPT1, export the report as RTF and print as bytes[]? Use Escape Codes? Any info for the above targeting C# .NET? I should handle printing my business object for every property to a specific location? HOW?
If it were me (and 20 years ago it would have been) I'd concentrate on writing the document in GDI properly as a good, well-structured C# program. From there Windows can render it onscreen or to just about any printer you've got drivers for.
Let Windows worry about the print drivers for actually rendering the GDI document onto paper and handling system things like what port it's connected to (USB, Parallel, etc..) and all of the nasty protocol details.
Please don't wire things to "LPT1", "COM" ports or any of that crap. Your admins and future users of your software will hate you for it.
I need to add printing capabilities to an app and I have been looking around for information about printing. Logical/physical sizes, dpi, font scaling, etc, lots to digest since I never programmed printing into any app before.
Are there any sites that would offer a primer on the topics of page sizes, margins and all the other elements required to understand printing on Windows? I've been looking around for a while but what I find is either cryptic or years old...
I've been playing around with TPrinter, but I would like to build solid printing functionalities and understand what I'm doing better.
Using a report solution is not an option, even though I'm sure it would provide better results much sooner.
Two links to get you started:
Printing with TPrinter
Printing via the TPrinter Canvas
I think that you are looking too lowlevel.
Try looking at the build reporting tools (Rave or whatever is in your product).
Personally i am using a product called Report Builder from Digital Metaphors.
But if you want to do the lowlevel stuff lot og good information can be found at efg's computer lab - printing
Well, I have done things a variety of ways in the past, including the "hard way" with TPrinter. In fact, I recently had to do that again to run a special inventory label printer.
On the other hand, sometimes you are better off taking work others have done and using it for your benefit. I agree that ReportSmith isn't so great, and also it's Delphi (and Windows) specific. Using Excel or Word has those limitations, plus the fact that the user has to actually have them installed.
One thing I have done to make printing easy for some simple applications is just to generate an HTML file and call the user's web browser, then they can print it. HTML tables can be created relatively easily for numerical data, and you can include photos, etc. as well. This works well for some applications, and works on every platform where a web browser is installed. The downside, of course, is that HTML isn't the most precise layout language.
The version of Delphi you´re using is important. A number of Delphis came with print engines like ReportSmith (ugh). Another option thinking laterally is to use MS Word as a print engine. I´ve hooked into instances of Word & Excel before & utilised their functionality. As to raw printing using TPrinter or the print method of TForm you´d have to be pretty desperate. I seem to recall the Pacheo / Texeira Delphi books coming with a pretty good overview so you might want to see if you can find a copy of that somewhere.