Continuous Paper not working

[Tobias]

Hi guys,

 

at the moment we are trying to figure out if we can use the Telerik Reporting to generate receipts on a thermo printer with endless paper.
We found the ContinuousPaper setting within the PageSettings but it doesn't seems to be working as expected. We are using the latest Version of Reporting (2018 R3)

When using the ContinuousPaper everything looks fine in the preview but after printing the paper gets cut after one DINA4 page. This happens when printing on the printer and when printing to a PDF file.

The only settings we have made is setting the ContinuousPaper property and adding a lot of textboxes to the report designer.

Any idea what we are doing wrong?

[Todor]

Hello Tobias,

I tested the described scenario. I have attached the sample report and the results of the tested Print/Export. Here are my findings :

- When Printing to PDF with 'Microsoft Print to PDF' virtual printer the issue is indeed reproduced - see 'MicrosoftPrintToPDF.pdf';
- When Printing to PDF with 'Foxit Print to PDF' (can be downloaded form Foxit) the output file is correct - 'FoxitPrintToPDF.pdf';
- When Exporting to PDF the generated file is as expected - 'ExportToPDF.pdf'.

The issue is probably related to the (virtual) printer not supporting 'Continuous Paper' option.

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik

[Tobias]

Hi Todor,

thanks for your response. That pointed me into the right direction.
The issue why it is cutting after a DINA4 page is related to the paper size settings of the printer.

Unfortunately, there seems to be another issue with the Telerik reporting. The default paper size of the printer is correctly set in the Windows settings. When trying to print from the Telerik Report Designer the Windows settings seems to be ignored or at least modified for some reason. Attached you can find some screenshots from the settings dialog, hope they explain our problem well.

We could live with the issue in the designer as we intend to print directly from our software but when we print directly from the code it is always using the wrong paper size. Is there a way to specify the correct paper size from the source code?

This is our current printing routine:

01.IReportDocument repDocList = new Report1(model);
02.
03.// set printer settings
04.PrinterSettings printSet = new PrinterSettings();
05.printSet.PrinterName = @"EPSON TM-T88VI Receipt";
06.
07.// create print controller
08.PrintController printCtrl = new StandardPrintController();
09.
10.// create report processor
11.ReportProcessor repProc = new ReportProcessor();
12.repProc.PrintController = printCtrl;
13.
14.InstanceReportSource repSrc = new InstanceReportSource();
15.repSrc.ReportDocument = repDocList;
16.
17.repProc.PrintReport(repSrc, printSet);

When I check the PrinterSettings in the debugger they look totally fine and the correct paper size is set.
We tried to modify the page settings of the report as well but it doesn't seems to have any effect at all.

Any thoughts what might be the problem?

Thanks in advance,
Tobias

[Silviya]

Hi Tobias,

From the provided screen shots and information, I understand that your default paper size of the printer is set in the Windows settings and it is correct. However, when you are trying to print from the Designer these settings are ignored and printed in A4 format.

My suggestion is to set the same PageSettings of the report as the default ones, i.e. please test setting the following properties (screen shot)
- Paper Size to Custom
- Paper Width to 80mm
- Paper Height to 3276mm
- uncheck the Print on continuous (roll) paper option

Regards,
Silviya
Progress Telerik

[Tobias]

Hi Silviya,

thanks for your resposne. I've tried that before and unfortunately it is not working.

Attached you can see a Screenshot with the correct printout (green) and the printout with your requested settings (red).

To get the green printout we have to edit the windows printer settings manually within the print dialog of the designer. As I said, this would work for the designer but we have to print automatically without any user interaction and haven't found a workaround yet.

Do you know any way how we can achieve this with some code?

 

[Silviya]

Hi Tobias,

We tested further, and indeed using Custom Paper Size the height is not respected. We consider this as bug and it is is logged in our system for improvement.
As a token of gratitude for directing us to the problem we have updated your Telerik points.

As a workaround, you'll need to edit the printer settings manually within the print dialog of the designer and then print in order to be respected.
I'm sorry for the caused inconvenience.

Regards,
Silviya
Progress Telerik

[Tobias]

Hi Silviya,

what’s about programmatically printing? Is there any workaround for this?

Kind Regards
Tobias

[Silviya]

Hello Tobias,

I created a sample project which prints either report with continuous paper setting enabled or with custom paper size settings. Both reports are printed as expected with set as default Foxit PDF Printer (I've included the output files too).

So, my assumption is that there is something about the default printer settings which prevents printing in the required size. You can also test to set explicitly a custom paper size of the default printer as:
printerSettings.DefaultPageSettings.PaperSize = new System.Drawing.Printing.PaperSize(string name, int width, int height).

I hope this would help.

Regards,
Silviya
Progress Telerik

[Pete]

We have come up against the same issue.

Could you please confirm that it will addressed in in the next release.

[Yves]

Currently we are thinking about renewing our Telerik license, but this is a critical issue for us. So could you please confirm that it is on the roadmap for the next release? 

If we can figure out a working workaround for printing programmatically this would be a possible solution for us too. But we are not able to get it working. 

 

Even setting printerSettings.DefaultPageSettings.PaperSize = new System.Drawing.Printing.PaperSize(string name, int width, int height) doesn't work.

 

Maybe you have a clue how we can set the same settings via code that we change in the designer. This does not seem to be working as expected.

 

Many thanks in advance, 

Yves

 

[Tobias]

[quote]Silviya said:Hello Tobias,

I created a sample project which prints either report with continuous paper setting enabled or with custom paper size settings. Both reports are printed as expected with set as default Foxit PDF Printer (I've included the output files too).

So, my assumption is that there is something about the default printer settings which prevents printing in the required size. You can also test to set explicitly a custom paper size of the default printer as:
printerSettings.DefaultPageSettings.PaperSize = new System.Drawing.Printing.PaperSize(string name, int width, int height).[/quote]

I have tried your example but the printout gets still cut.

When checking the printerSettings.DefaultPageSettings.PaperSize I can see the correct paper size specified in the windows printer settings. Changing them doesn't seem to have any effect at all. It doesn't matter if I try a smaller or a larger paper size, the printout is always cut after one A4 page.

[Silviya]

Hello all,

I'm sorry for the delayed response.

Honestly, I do understand that this is a serious issue and we have been investigating it on our side. Our development team investigated and tried to reproduce the strange behavior with the provided project from my previous answer, however, I'm afraid without much success. Either printing from the designer, or code-behind through Telerik Report Processor. Unfortunately, we do not currently have such physical printer in our disposition to test print the report and give more specific advice.

I understand there is something that breaks the printing and if it's possible to try to isolate it in a sample program which will print with the default printer settings without using any Reporting libraries. This test would be of great help for us to further research the case. If the output is cut to A4, then we would assume that there is something about the default printer settings of the current used printer.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Regards,
Silviya
Progress Telerik

[Pete]

Could you please keep me informed of your testing when you have access to a continuous paper printer.

The one we're using is an EPOSN TM-T88V, which is a very common printer in EPoS applications.

[Yves]

We are also using mostly EPSON TM-T88V and TM-T88VI which is the newer version.

I did a sample project for you only using minimalistic printing functions.

Also attached a screenshot of running programm to see default windows values for "printing" variables.

 

You could also deliver me some pdb's and i could debug it for you :-P :-D  

 

See:

https://ufile.io/cubve

 

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hi all,

The referenced sample app prints a single page with long text, which on fixed size printer leads to cut text in the end of the page. I am not sure how this relates to the issue. No screenshot is attached.

What we will do is to acquire a printer to test locally. Once we have anything to share, we will do so.

The pdb. files get shipped with the installation of the Telerik Reporting product, the default location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Progress\Telerik Reporting R3 2018\Bin

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hi Miles,

 

thanks for your reply. Your forum gave me an 500 error when posting my last post. Since the post was visible I thought the attachments were also uploaded.

no this sample application prints an very long ticket on a thermal printer. notging gets cut.

i can’t upload my screenshot currently but I attached a foto, what is the result of this sample app.

 

hopefully it gets uploaded now. This is the result when printed on a thermal printer with the attached app. 

 

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Thanks,

I will post an update when having local test results.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hi all,

We have now thermal roll-paper printer - it is Epson T-TM20II. With its default setting and using the standalone designer the ContinuousPaper=true setting gets respected just as it should be: The whole report gets printed on a single sheet of paper and cut is performed after its end. Please see the attached image (these are two separate prints). No need to change any PrinterSetting, either programmatically or thru the Print dialog.
We tested with the default printer setting for paper size: Roll Paper 80 x 297 mm. The print correctly exceeds that size when the report is longer. Then we switched the printer default (or windows) setting to Roll Paper 80 x 3276 mm and got the same result without making any setup on the current print job (see the second attachment).

Please send us exact steps to reproduce the issues you are facing, so that we can advance together in this, now that we can test with the physical device. I will keep you updated if we find something on our end.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hi Milen, sorry for late response, we were really busy.

[quote]

Please send us exact steps to reproduce the issues you are facing, so that we can advance together in this, now that we can test with the physical device. I will keep you updated if we find something on our end.

[/quote]

 

I made some samples using Silviya's reports/sln. I used Windows Problem step recorder so you can see what i have done.

Results were:

1 - printing from sln using uriReportSource.Uri = reportWithCustomPaperSize;       WRONG (too short)

2 - printimg from sln using uriReportSource.Uri = reportWithContinuousPaper;       WRONG (too short)

3 - printing from designer                                                                                           RIGHT

 

for all examples i used a Epson TM-T88VI with newest epson windows drivers, default papersize is set to Roll Paper 80 x 3276 mm

 

Hopefully these informations help you to find the problem.

If you need additional information just contact me/us.

 

 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xt2oul1za2df4mw/ContinousPaperTests.zip?dl=0 

In the link you can find the recorded steps for both scenarios and pictures of the results.

 

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hello Yves,

Thank you for responding to my request and for the your detailed description.

Based on this, here is what I tried locally:

Made sure our printer's paper size is the same, then performed two tests with the "Print on continuous paper" turned on. I believe this is the appropriate setting for using this family of printers. Setting a specific Height in order to match the content is a workaround that was meaningful before we introduced the dedicated feature.

Test1:
1. Modified the data source of ReportContinuousPaper.trdp to have 10 records only (because we are green).
2. Printed using the console app, making sure from the debug info I am using the correct printer.

Test2:
1. Further modified the report to change its page size Width to match the paper: 80mm and no margins.
2. Printed using the console app, making sure from the debug info I am using the correct printer.

Please find the attached screen movie of the performed tests, shots of the resulting prints, and a screenshot of the paper settings. The result looks correct to me. Any comments are more than welcome.

Thanks again to anyone looking into this.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hello Milen,

thanks for response.

This looks all good for me i also used debugger to check all "available" information is set right. Looks also valid on my site,

but print result isn't valid. This seems to be a very tricky issue and not really easy to find. 

What makes me crazy is the fact that it works in designer but not in console application. I allready decompiled the reporting dll with the hope finding any hints. No results on this. 

You have any further ideas how we can get closer to the issue?

Maybe its a just in the combination with our printer/printer-driver and the reporting library. It's one of the most common used ticket printer. Also strange is using no reporting library (just windows default printing) it works out of the box. 

Would it help you to get some kind of remote debugging?

Maybe as a last step i could also arrange sending a printer to one of your offices in europe if it could help? 

 

We would really like to use Telerik Reporting Library for all of our printing jobs and its really frustrating. 

 

Maybe i will try if i can use your printer driver on our printer and recheck your results.

 

Best Regards,

Yves

[Yves]

Hello Milen, 

got bad news for you. I installed the TM-T20 printer driver to my computer and used it with our TM-T80 VI. The printer in general works but prints very slowly, so we are sure it is using the T20 driver.

Even using the T20 driver i can reproduce my issue and the console application is not printing the full document. Printing over the designer gives us the full printout again.

 

So it doesn't seem to be a driver related issue.

 

Just to make sure we are using the same version for test, we are using v12.2 for our tests.

 

Any comments are welcome.

 

Best Regards,

Yves

 

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hello Yves,

Thanks for digging into this!
So, the driver on my side is the one attached as a screenshot. I found it available here: https://epson.com/Support/Point-of-Sale/Thermal-Printers/Epson-TM-T20II/s/SPT_C31CD52062 - Advanced Printer Driver v5.10. It does print pretty fast actually - the prints from my previous reply take about a second. Can you give this a try, if possible?

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hi Milen, 

i reinstalled my driver. I'm using the same version (see attached screenshot). 

Still i got the same result and print ends after A4 size. 

 

Any idea how to dig deeper into it?

 

Best Regards

[Yves]

Hi Milen, 

its me again with some good or bad news (i dont know). 

 

I got a TM-T20II printer here for testing. With the TM-T20II - which you also use - i cannot reproduce the issue.

With the TM-T80 V / VI the issue is always present.

 

Any ideas how to proceed?

 

[Yves]

Here is some additional information i found out spectating the printer queues - see attached screenshot.

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hi Yves,

Once again thanks for the dedication with this printing issue.

I feel tempted to just tell you that this seems to be an Epson issue since one of the printers is working. From the other side the ReportDesigner prints correctly on both printers, so it seems there is something we should be able to do to influence this.

A quick test I would ask you to do (I do not have high expectations, but still). Please put a read line statement in the end of the console app, so that does not close immediately after the print operation.
Meantime I hope I will be able to spare some more time to look into the code base and see if I can come up with a reasonable idea.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hi Milen 

i tested with Console.ReadLine() it did not change the behaviour (paper gets cut after A4 on TM-T88VI) - like expected. 
So it doesn't seem to be a issue realted to thread termination.

But i also have some good news for you to get a better starting point for your resarch. 
I found a workaround thats working with the TM-T88VI.

Summary of my researches:

- Printing without Telerik (using .Net Default printing and/or using other Reporting Library) it works on both printers 
(TM-T88VI/TM-T20II) regardless used Windows Printer-Settings - nothing gets cut
- Using Printer TM-T20II with Telerik it works as expected regardless used Windows Printer-Settings - nothing gets cut 

-  Using Printer TM-T88VI it works in Designer regardless used Windows-Printer-Settings - nothing gets cut 
- Using Printer TM-T88VI it ONLY works if i change the paper settings in the "printer settings" -> 
"advanced" -> "default values" -> "paper" -> "advanced" -> "paper size"

- changing the "printer settings" -> "general" -> "settings" -> "paper" -> "advanced" -> "paper size" it doesn't work  
it seems as if the console application isn't ignoring the page settings an also using the "wrong" settings.

So it seems that there is some difference between designer printing and "console" printing, that the designer ignores all configured page settings, 
and the console application is always using the ""Advanced" Printer-Settings Default Page Settings".

Because when not using Telerik everything works as expected, this seems to be an Telerik Issue and not an Epson/Windows issue.

 

Hopefully i could convey it clearly to you, if you have further questions don't hesitate to ask me. 

I could also make screencaptures of these two settings if you can't find them on your own.

 

Best Regards,

Yves

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hello Yves,

Thanks for the additional input! It is great that there is a printer settings workaround. I tried to find information what is the difference between the two settings and here it is: https://superuser.com/questions/281980/what-is-the-difference-between-preferences-and-printing-defaults-on-printer . It seems that the first tab Advanced settings changes the settings for the current user only and the Advanced -> Printing Defaults changes the settings for any users that do not have specified settings. Having this in mind it seems that without opening the print dialog the printer settings get resolved incorrectly - using different user maybe. 

To confirm that, please try the following code snippet in the console application:

var reportWithContinuousPaper = @"ReportContinuousPaper.trdp";

Telerik.Reporting.Processing.ReportProcessor reportProcessor
    = new Telerik.Reporting.Processing.ReportProcessor();

Telerik.Reporting.UriReportSource uriReportSource =
    new Telerik.Reporting.UriReportSource();

uriReportSource.Uri = reportWithContinuousPaper;

reportProcessor.PrintReport(uriReportSource, null);

This will make the Windows Print Dialog to popup and it will resolve the printer settings just like in the report designer app. Please do not forget to return the "Printing Defaults" to the failing ones.

Surely I tested and debugged making both settings pointing to the shorter paper size our local printer - it printed correctly.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hi Milen, 

 

i tested with your code suggestion. 

 

With default (short paper size) settings, it gets cut after A4 on the TM-T88VI even after opening the print dialog.

If i change the settings to the right ones (long paper size) in the print dialog it does not get cut.

 

Any further ideas how we can support you getting closer to this problem?

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hello Yves,

This is a valuable input. So basically the observed behavior shows that in the context of the console application the Windows Print Dialog opens with the "short" page settings, meaning that it (the dialog) gets the non - "user specific" settings.

Here is the code the opens the dialog when you do not provide valid PrinterSettings:

using (var printDialog = new System.Windows.Forms.PrintDialog())
            {
                printDialog.AllowSomePages = true;
                printDialog.UseEXDialog = true;
                printDialog.AllowCurrentPage = allowCurrentPage;

                if (null != printerSettings)
                {
                    printDialog.PrinterSettings = printerSettings;
                }

                if (DialogResult.OK != printDialog.ShowDialog())
                {
                    return false;
                }

                printerSettings = printDialog.PrinterSettings;
                return true;
            }

How about if you copy the whole code snippet into a button click handler in a Windows Forms or WPF app? Does the Print Dialog get initialized correctly? I am running out of other ideas. It seems to me that the driver returns the incorrect set of settings in some cases. Thank you for finding out that fixing the non-"user specific" page settings mitigates the issue for this printer.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Yves]

Hi Milen, 

sorry that it took me so long to respond. 

When using the following snippet in WinForms, the dialog opens but it is also using the non-user default settings.

01.private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
02.        {
03.            var reportWithContinuousPaper = @"ReportContinuousPaper.trdp";
04.
05.            Telerik.Reporting.Processing.ReportProcessor reportProcessor
06.                = new Telerik.Reporting.Processing.ReportProcessor();
07.
08.            Telerik.Reporting.UriReportSource uriReportSource =
09.                new Telerik.Reporting.UriReportSource();
10.
11.            uriReportSource.Uri = reportWithContinuousPaper;
12.
13.            reportProcessor.PrintReport(uriReportSource, null);
14.        }

I also have no more clues to get closer to this issue. Maybe it is a driver related issue but it's still very strange that the Telerik Designer seems to get the right informations and a console/Winforms app doesn't. 

 

So it seems we have to use the found workaround to correctly print on continous paper with some devices.

 

 

[Yves]

Hi Milen, 

sorry that it took me so long to respond. 

When using the following code snipet in WinForms App the print dialog gets opened correctly. But it also gets the "wrong" non-user default settings, even i configured the printer on my user correctly. 

01.private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
02.        {
03.            var reportWithContinuousPaper = @"ReportContinuousPaper.trdp";
04.
05.            Telerik.Reporting.Processing.ReportProcessor reportProcessor
06.                = new Telerik.Reporting.Processing.ReportProcessor();
07.
08.            Telerik.Reporting.UriReportSource uriReportSource =
09.                new Telerik.Reporting.UriReportSource();
10.
11.            uriReportSource.Uri = reportWithContinuousPaper;
12.
13.            reportProcessor.PrintReport(uriReportSource, null);
14.        }

 

I also don't have any further ideas to get closer to this issue. Maybe it's some driver related issue but it's weired that the Telerik Report Designer is acting different than a WinForms App. So it seems there is a way to control this behaviour whats not used in the Console/Winforms App.

I think to support continous printing via your reports we will have to use the found workaround via "non-user" default settings on some devices. That's okay for me so far. 

 

Best Regards, 

Yves

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hi Yves,

Thanks for looking into the issue. This was not exactly what I suggested. My idea was to use the exact snippet of my last reply to see if the System.Windows.Forms.PrintDialog loads correctly and returns the user-specific settings when the dialog gets closed (asserted using debug or trace). No reporting involved. However i suspect the result will be the same, confirming that this is printer driver specific behavior. Please give it a try when you get the chance.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

[Pete]

Could you please confirm if this issue has been resolved & in which version?

[Todor]

Hello Pete,

The bug related to custom paper size height that is described at the beginning of this thread is not fixed yet.

The issue related to Continuous Paper cannot be reproduced locally and for that reason, we cannot investigate further. We still think this is a printer driver specific behavior.

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik

[Bruno]

Hello

I have the same problem, had make a lot of testes and wont work.

In these post Telerik say cant reprocude the problem, but i have these problem with all printer i had test.

Please help me with these problem

 

Thanks

Bruno

[Todor]

Hi Bruno,

Can you send us a minimal runnable project that we may use to reproduce the problem?

For example, you may open a support ticket and attach it there.

Which Reporting version do you use?

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik