Printing quality problem

[bilik]

We spend incredible amount of time to find out how to how to make
reliable print from EXE done in LV6.0.2 under W9x,WinNT, W2K. But we
have no solution.

First we used direct print VI panel, after VI competition, but there
are many problems with it. Then we left it and switched to report
generation, now we are at the same situation.

-Report generation does under WinNT and W2K different size of report
on printer printout, NI-support suggest: LET USE W98.

-Using W98, printing on printer with page format A4, EXE crashed.
NI-support
suggest: LET USE WinNT,W2K

-Another problem: after printing to printer, the memory space used by
LV is growing while using report generation VIs after every print even
though I closed report reference. Each print make
app. or LV allocated
memory 3 MB higher. The newly allocated memory is no more released and
all VI's are after 3to 5 printouts really slow.

Seems to me probably nobody is using report generation VI's, because
there is no way to use it.

Seems to me also, that the only way (but painful) how to print from
LV6.0.2 is the same, which exists since LV4 - print panel after
competition (the same solution as 4 years ago...). Even this solution
is really bad under W98 printing to HP printers - we can see very
often that EXE crashed after printing, or sometimes fonts have correct
size and sometimes not.

The only reliable way is: using VI server function, generate
physically BMP file on hard disk and then this BMP print out using
paint.exe(MS-paintbrush). Printouts are reliable, but because of
generated BMP they look like from ZX Spectrum or Atari age. Also we
can generate HTML physically to HDD, but there is no way how to ensure
the same size of each item on print (HTML <-> MSexplorer problem)
, so
it is unusable. Also unusable is to force customer to buy and use
MS-word to be able print from our application done in LabVIEW.

Maybe we are doing something wrong, but we cannot to find the problem.

Thanks for any help.

[Joe_Guo]

First of all, what are you trying to print out? the front panel, a control, or some text? Simply put, labview does not have many options for print.

If you are trying to print some graphs, you can use other software (activeX). labivew only prints what you see on the screen and you cannot resize the output.

you can send the information to Excel or word and print it through vi server. most of people have word or excel installed anyway.

hope this can give you some idea

joe

[LakeLogic]

To produce presentation quality graphs and the like from LabView I suggest using a little shareware utility from Ravitz Software called PrintGL. The Windows version, PrintGLN.exe costs about $80 US. It's available from www.concentric.net/~ravitz

This little gem allows you to generate charts with custom axes and annotate them to your heart's content. It works by generating HPGL code, and is configurable to work with almost any printer. From LabView you use the EXEC command to call PrintGLN to print a data file.

[DavidBoyd]

I don't have any complaints about printing from LV - well, not many, anyway.

First things first - there is a known bug in the 'Print Panel at Completion' method of printing, under LV6.0.2, when running under Win95/98. It involves LV not releasing resources, causes font corruption, and ultimately an assert/crash. It DOES NOT happen under WinNT/2K. If you MUST run W95/98, you can specify 'bitmap printing' as a workaround, but this is very slow.
Apart from that, I have generally excellent results using print on completion under LV6, usually to an HP LaserJet. A few things I've learned:

1) Disable scaling in the VI print setup - this just confuses things. Size the objects on the VI panel to fit the printable area (LV uses 72 pixels/inch).

2) Create
the 'print on completion' VI as something that is never shown onscreen - don't try to make one VI do onscreen presentation and printing.

3) Paint the background of the printing VI white.

4) If you drop a graphic on the printing VI's FP (like a company logo), get a BIG, high res image. After pasting it, shrink/resize it w/in LV. When it prints, the full resolution is retained and used.

5) Paint control/indicator frames and 'stuff' either white or transparent. These things can really clutter the printed results.

Hope this helps - I've used this method to produce some really sharp test reports, certificates of conformance, etc.

Regards,
Dave