Is it possible to have printing going to more than one printer at
a time?

I have some reports that will have to be printed both to Adobe
Distiller and to a hardcopy printer. These reports are written using
a report master class that uses set printer on and ?. This master
class also has an option for output to a form.

I see three alternatives:

1) Switch between printers each physical print method call. (There
are many of these for a typical report.) This would involve changing
my report master class only. I would like to do this, but when I use
set printer to name <printername>
to switch it starts a new print job each time.

2) Modify my report master class to print to a temporary file, then
feed that to each printer. This is not too big of a change, but there
are bound to be a few quirks. One is capturing changes to paper
orientation.

3) Rewrite each report to print the report once for each printer. So
much for abstraction.

Can 1 be done? It definitely is the smallest change.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.

Hi Gene,

1) As you have already observed, each SET PRINTER TO ... starts a new printjob.
I don't know of a way in foxpro, to resume an ended printjob. AFAIK, you can't
start a second printjob without closing the first. Foxpro supports only one
print chanel at a time.

2) I think, it is not a good solution, since there are too many dependencies
with the printer drivers involved: paper size/orientation, fonts, colors,
positioning...
You could use a temporary file at an abstract level, to resolve these
dependencies at the time when copying to the printer. So, this copying must be
an active process, not simply moving some bytes from here to there.
But then you have something like your version 3, only at an intermediate level.

3) With foxpro commands, I think this is the best solution.
What is the problem with this solution? Open the first printer, do your report,
open the second printer, do your report again. The only thing to to: open
different printers. The report itself should be independent from the printer.
This should be very easy, even with ?/?? printing. But you should keep any
calculation, that is not related to reporting, off your report

4) You could fiddle around with WinApi, GDI and GDI+ calls to do what you want.
But this is a lot of work and it would not integrate with your ? approach.

Regards
Bernhard Sander

Bernhard Sander <fuchs (AT) no (DOT) spam> wrote:

[snip]

I do not think that there is one, but asked in case I was wrong.

The only dependency that I have to worry about is orientation. My
reports are plain text: no colour, no bold, etc.

It would stay in the report master class though.

What do you mean by calculation not related to reporting? My
most complex reports have quite a bit of calculation related to
reporting in them. They also are the ones that need to run under the
new regime. Other can wait.

Yipe, yipe, yipe! That would be a big rewrite.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.

Hi Gene

report and your printers, there may be other things that will make trouble.

adding/subtracting amounts from accounts or the like. Since you execute the
report more than once those calculations should be done outside the report.

Regards
Bernhard Sander

Hi Vince

simultanously, such as one printer, some files (html, xls...).
But I don't see how to output to several printers simultanously.

Regards
Bernhard Sander

I would create an exe who's whole purpose is to take xml input and report and
dump it to a specific printer.

PrintRpt.exe <cXMLStream> <cReportFile> <cPrinterName>

then just spawn off 3 instances if youw anted to print to 3 different printers.


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