Silverlight Viewer native printing is very large sometimes

[danparker276]

I'm using the report viewer q1 2013 build 7.0.13.412 and I'm setting UseNativePrinting=true.
On a 15 page report 1 machine at a customer site is 50 times larger (size the printer sees) than the other machine.
the smaller size machine has adobe PDF while the large size one has Nuance PDF and no adobe installed.  Since UseNativePrinting=true, this should make a difference though right?

It should automatically do vector printing right?
The printers are different, should that make a difference?  The other machine is on a VDI system, so maybe it doesn't tell the silverlight program that it has vector printing.

Can I force vector printing with the report viewer?  Because silverlight will default to bitmap if it doesn't see the drivers.

[Peter]

Hello Dan,

In Q3 2012 we have started to build the Silverlight report viewer against Silverlight 5. In this Silverlight version MS have added vector printing and greatly reduced the printing document size.

In your case our suggestion is to clear the client machine browser cache, to make sure that an old version of the Silverlight client application is not cached by the browser. Additionally you can try with another browser.

Generally the Silverlight native print don't depend in any way on the used PDF plugin.

Regards,
Peter
Telerik

[danparker276]

I think what is happening is that it tries to print in vector, but it can't find the postscript printer drivers.  If Silverlight 5 can't find the postscript drivers then it goes to bitmap printing.  But you can force vector printing in Silvelight 5 and I was wondering if I could do that in reports.  Code to force vector printing is like:

PrinterFallbackSettings settings = new PrinterFallbackSettings();
settings.ForceVector = true;
settings.OpacityThreshold = 0.5;

I go this code from:
http://10rem.net/blog/2011/06/11/silverlight-5-vector-and-bitmap-printing-for-reports-and-more


This customer we have uses a VDI systems for their desktop and it's probably because they haven't set up the printer drivers correctly to work in the environment.  I am unable to do anything about this from my end, so I was wondering if I could just force vector printing.

[Peter]

Hi,

Our suggestion is to use our WCF service to render the report in XAML and then print it with Silverlight print with ForceVector set to True. Check out the following forum thread thread that further elaborates on the topic.

Regards,
Peter
Telerik