A report that we designed using Report Designer works fine here using our Brother HL-8e, but behaves strangely on multi-line text for the client using their HP Laserjet 5M printer. The report, which should look like this -

Address:    Level 1

	    169-171 Phillip St

	    Sydney

Telephone:  9232 3022

Comes out like this -

Address:    Level 1

Telephone:  9232 3022

	    169-171 Phillip St

	    Sydney

with some strikeover between the phone and address. They have tried using both a 5M driver and a 4M+ driver to no avail. Is there any solution to this, either from within Report Designer or Windows?

Thanks,

Georgia Lowe

With regard to the above problem, here is a screen shot. If anyone has encountered this and has a solution, please let us know.

Thanks, Georgia

Georgia,

Haven't got the slightest experience with the Reporter, just a lot of experience with everything else that can go wrong.

But it might look like the Reporter didn't notice that the content of the Address field covered 3 lines, and put the Telephone field too high up. To me it seems it has put the Telephone field exactly where it should be if the content of the Address field covered 1 line. (Never mind the lines don't overlap exactly. It seems the reporter (or your report) uses more vertical space between fields than between the lines of a field.)

- Is there some setting you can alter for the Address field in your report?

- Or perhaps the Reporter doesn't really expect more than one line? Does the Address field need to be defined as a different type of field - e.g TEXT???

- Or could there be something wrong with the Address field? Does it contain a different delimiter between the lines than the Reporter expects???

Especially if you have other reports where multiline fields work properly I'd check all such settings and types to see if I could spot a difference.

If you're still stuck after this I'd try one of the following:

- If you e.g know your Address will never be more than 4 lines, you could put three blank lines between it and the Telephone field. Then they won't overlap. But it won't look neat either, because often the result will be empty lines before the Telephone field.

- Make e.g 4 symbolic fields AddressLine1, AddressLine2, etc - each containing one line of the Address field. Use the new symbolic fields instead of the Address field. The result will be even less neat than with the previous suggestion, because again there will be empty lines before the Telephone field, and in addition you will get more vertical space within the address. The saving grace might be if you can tell the Reporter not to use space (room) for the fields AddressLine1-AddressLine3 if they're empty.

- Put something non-printing between the Address and Telephone fields (a line with zero width????) and see if that changes anything.

- Oystein -

Thanks, Oystein, for your help. We've tried most of those things. We may have to revert to adding extra lines after the Address to cope, although it will look weird when we print it out at our end (which works fine normally). We've tried looking at Fonts and Printer Drivers, but there doesn't seem to be anything different there.

Georgia.

I assume you have tried enlarging the 'print area' on the reporter form…I've noticed different behavior when using different print devices and sometime changing the size of the area (and be sure marked mulit-value) makes a difference…..good luck.. [email protected]

[url=http://www.wws.net/arcs/]ARCS, Inc.

Thanks Paxton - that's the next thing to try in despiration.

Georgia

Georgia,

Paxton says to mark the field (?) multi-value. Is your Address field a multivalued field? I thought it was a TEXT field, with @TMs. But certainly it must be one of those two.

Either way - can't you try with a symbolic which is the other version? I mean if your Address field is mv let the symbolic be TEXT with a formula that simply swaps @VMs with @TMs. If your Address field is TEXT let the symbolic be mv and swap @TMs with @VMs.

Btw - Does the Telephone field always overlap the second address line?

Btw again - where are the responses from all the developers that use the Reporter? (I assume Paxton uses it, but certainly he can't be the only one?)

- Oystein -

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