Font appearence is wrong on printout

[Bandit]

Hi,

I'm looking for help with a font printing issue (LabVIEW 8.5, WinXP).

My application produces a report. I'm trying to reproduce an in-house report, give the user a preview on screen and then allow them to hit a print button and print it out.

I'm using the Times New Roman true type font. It looks fine on screen.

Print it out, and areas in bold look OK, but plain area's look tall and narrow, as though a narrow font is selected.

Printing a word document from the same machine, with the same printer, using the same font, does not result in the same problem.

In comparison to the word document, I notice that the LabVIEW text also prints smaller, so I have to boost the font size by 3 or 4 points.

Any ideas? (try to avoid suggesting purchase of the report generation toolkit/module  )

If it's nothing obvious from the description I have given please post and let me know, so I can post example code by return.

Bandit.

Message Edited by Bandit on 02-28-2008 04:57 PM

[rsw]

Hi,

Could you upload your code please, I will take a look at what it's doing and if theres a property of font issue within your program and let you know,

All the best,

[Bandit]

Hi Rob, thanks for your reply.

Please find a simplified example attached that exhibits the behaviour. This would normally be called as a subvi, but has default data so it can be run on it's own.

The controls that allow the sub-vi to receive data are hidden so they don't print.

The .vi will print to your default printer every time it is run - I'm using the option to print every time the vi completes execution in 'vi properties-print options'

The table and strings on the report would normally be transparent, but I made them grey so you could see what was going on more easily.

Note the different fields in the table are set up with different text properties (italics, bold etc). When printed times new roman looks fine in bold, but tall and thin in plain form. Also as mentioned before the fonts are 3 to 4 points larger to give the same appearence as our standard house report.

Hope this helps you identify the problem. Post back if you need anything else.

Regard

Bandit.

[rsw]

Hi,

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back too you, thats very unusual behaviour indeed - sadly the majority of our examples use the report generation toolkit to format and output report data. I'll continue to look into this for you to try and find out why it's behaving this way and if theres a solution for it.

All the best,

[rsw]

Hi,

I'm not sure why it's doing that, it may be a windows font issue when attempting to write a report like this as I don't seem to be able to overwrite that setting - do you have access to the report generation toolkit at all?

All the best,

[johnsold]

Bandit,

It appears that it may be a Windows issue. On my Mac the printout looks identical to the screen image.

Lynn

[Bandit]

Lynne, thanks for trying on the Mac, that narrows things down a bit.

Rob, I don't have access to the report toolkit for MS office, I do have the report writing vi's that come with LabVIEW Pro though. I avoided them because I hadn't used them before and wanted something quick and simple - lol. I used a table because I could make the rows resize to fit the text when it wrapped (as you see I have done in the example I posted). Some of the entries in the report can be several lines long.

I'd like to get the report writing toolkit, but don't have the use to justify it at the moment.

I ought to spend some time learning to use the report writing features in LabVIEW pro, but don't have the time/budget on this project.

Meanwhile this anomoly with the Times New Roman font remains an interesting problem. At the moment I'm working around it using Arial instead, but it's not the house style, and sooner or later someone will pull me up about it.

Regards,

Bandit

[rsw]

Hi,

Yes sadly it appears to be a windows issue with that font - not sure why, as we have no other machines here I'm able to test it on that are running different operating systems - sounds like a good plan for now! If you are interested in learning the report VI's I'm sure plenty exist under LabVIEW example finder (Help > Find Examples) which is always a good place to start. If you require any help on this please let me know.

Have a good weekend!

Regards,

[Bandit]

I'd rather say it's a Windows/LabVIEW problem - after all it doesn't appear using for example MS Word on the same operating system/PC/printer combination. Perhaps Microsoft have a workround they aren't sharing? I don't know, that's just speculation.

If it's not something you can solve Rob, can you feed it to the LabVIEW development team to look at? And could you point me to the method of raising suspected issues in LabVIEW. I find one occasionally, but can never remember how to submit them for investigation and (if necessary) fix. I see others do it occasionally on the forum, they have some form of reference number so there must be a system for doing this that I have either missed or forgoten about. 

Please don't think this is a moan about finding loads of problems - generally the problems with my applications are a result of me, not problems in LabVIEW!

Enjoy your weekend.

Regards

Bandit 

[rsw]

Hi,

Ofcourse I will, that's no problem at all - we like getting this feedback from our customers so we're able to fix it and improve our product range. I will look into this issue and let you know - it may have already been placed up as an issue, if so I will quote you the reference number for it.

All the best,