Label printing to slow with high speed label printer

rbuser

All the print-outs in our program is done with Report Builder and we are
very happy with the functionality and average speed of RB in general
printing.

However, we have now had the same problem at two customer sites and we
haven't come up with a solution yet. When printing product labels with high
speed Checkpoint/Meto printers the speed is too slow. The printing pauses
between every label which makes printing hundreds and thousands of labels to
slow. When printing from Metos own label program or from a label sheet in
eg. Microsoft Word the same printer prints hundreds of labels extremely fast
with no noticable pause at all between each label.

Our label report is very simple. Only a few database text fields (eg.
product code, name etc.) on a eg. 10 cm x 5 cm label.

Do you have any suggestion on what we should look into to get the printouts
from RB to be as fast as from other printing applications? The first
customer had to resort to doing his own label printouts from our database
using MS Access and ODBC. We would very much like to avoid that "solution"
in this second case.

Regards
Kjell

nardmoseley

ReportBuilder uses standard Windows API commands to render to the printer. I
do not know what the difference might be.

1. Try running the application under profiler such as AQTime to see where
the bottle necks are.

2. Perhaps the other programs such as MS Word do not issue
StartPage/EndPage commands for each label. As a test modify your Delphi
library to include RBuilder\Source prior the entry for RBuilder\Lib. Then
open ppPrnDev.pas and find the methods TppPrinterDevice.StartPage and
EndPage. Comment out the lines that call Printer.StartPage and
Printer.EndPage. Then run the application and test whether that speeds up
performance.

3. If the printer has built-in fonts, you can optimize performance by using
them.



--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors Corporation
http://www.digital-metaphors.com