Printer Troubleshooting

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Printer Troubleshooting

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Some printer drivers have bugs. If you cover a problem with printing, please try another printer driver or another printer first. There are sometimes problems with HP Laserjet 4 drivers. Please report bugs regarding HP Laserjet Drivers to Microsoft or HP.

As a replacement for HP PCL drivers you can for example use compatible Lexmark PCL printer drivers, which are very good.

If your output looks garbaged: enable the option "Print True-Type as graphics" in the printer-options dialog or with the DevTTOption property by code.

Problems with clipping: Some drivers cause problems with text clipping.  The drivers are not able to clip letters, so they print the whole letters instead. The y2 border of VpeWrite(Box) might be crossed by letters, which should be printed only in part. You might experience this problem when using VpeWrite(Box) with a fixed y2 coordinate.  If y2 has a value other than VFREE and the last line of the text is printed in part on the screen, this last line might be printed completely on the printer.

The solution is to set y2 smaller, so that the whole line is clipped.

Printing colors: Some printer drivers may not print colored text, printing nothing instead. This may also occur with lines and all other graphics depending on the chosen color.

Printing hatch styles: Some printer drivers may not print hatch styles correctly.

Problems with HP 4 Plus printer-drivers,and maybe other PCL printer drivers for HP 4 series. (NOT: II, III, 5, 6):

The True-Type technology fails here, which might lead into the following problem under special circumstances: If there is long text with no or only one or two gaps (blanks) the gaps are eliminated, and text is drawn close together. This happens, because VPE works device independent and renders the text size (in pixels) onto a virtual UHR (Ultra High Resolution) device. Sadly the HP4 Plus driver returns very slightly different sizes, to what it should.

Possible workarounds:

1.The best way is, to activate in the options dialog of the printer-setup the checkbox "Print True-Type as bitmap" or "Print True-Type as graphics". This can also be done by code with TTOption = VTT_BITMAP.

2.We internally implemented a workaround which will solve the problem, if you use Write() or WriteBox() and set a bit (about 1mm) larger object widths than needed for other printers.

3.Use a Lexmark PCL driver, they are very good, or use the HP Laserjet III driver