Printing Problem

[tonyt]

Hi Brendan
Trying to print some records and fields from a form. When I select the two fields I want to print, only one shows in the preview. If I select a third, then two show up in the preview?
Cheers
tony

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Brendan]

Hi Tony,

When you’re in multi-column list view mode, resize your columns then try printing again. That should help.

Thanks,

Brendan

[tonyt]

Thanks Brendan
But why does field width have anything to do with it when you have selected a field to print? That means having to alter all the field widths in a multi field form in order to print what you want and then go back to the form and redo the field widths to suit screen size?
Cheers
tony
I guess its due to TF’s internal workings which I don’t pretend to understand – sqlite and the rest.

[Brendan]

Hi Tony,

It has to do with the fact that the column widths for printing purposes are tied to the column widths of the display in multi-column list view mode.

Tap Forms doesn’t attempt to shrink the columns during printout, so when you tried to add a third field to print, there was not enough space to fit it, so it leaves it off. You could have rotated the printout orientation to landscape and you probably would have been able to have that third field. Or, adjust the column widths on the multi-column list view.

It’s just an implementation detail although more of a workaround for now. Eventually I plan on building a proper list view report generator engine which would let you layout the list view reports and decide how wide columns should be in a custom report layout. At that point I will probably remove the checkboxes to enable or disable printing of the fields because you would have already setup your report layout to have the fields you want. And you would be able to create multiple reports just as you can create multiple custom detail view layouts right now.

But that’s just an idea at the moment and nothing concrete. But it’s in my long-term vision.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Cliff Tarrance]

Hi Brendan,

I hope you can do something about this because I just spent a long frustrating time trying to work out a similar issue. I lost count of the number of times I had to cycle between Print Preview and the multi-column view to finally arrive at a good result for the output.

The problem is that though there may be some relationship between the column widths of print and screen, that relationship is far from obvious. Furthermore, to get a decent printout, the columns on the screen need to be too narrow to be of any use. It is frustrating because when I had proper-width columns on screen, the print preview excluded my last column, even though there was plenty of room available.

I also encountered some odd behavior when resizing columns. I would start dragging the edge of one column, and suddenly I would find that the column to the left of it is the one that got resized. That happened multiple times.

Anyway, I’m sure you get lots of requests, but I hope this is one that gets some priority.

Thanks!

[Cliff Tarrance]

Messing around with this some more, I think I noticed something….

I am trying to print the multi-column list in landscape. When I do a print preview, it is indeed in landscape BUT Tap Forms isn’t using the full width of the page. It is almost as if it wants to give me only as much width as I’d have if printing portrait.

I have to make the columns narrow narrow narrow before all of my fields appear on the page. So several of the columns have truncated values. Meanwhile there is oodles of unused space to the right of my last column.

In short, I think this is a bug report and not a feature request!

Thanks

[Cliff Tarrance]

I continued to tinker, but I’m giving up. No combination of field widths in the screen view can give me a satisfactory printed output. There is absolutely no relationship between what’s on the screen and what’s on the page. I can make the first column as narrow as possible, or wide enough to fill the width of the page, and it still comes out the same on the printout (which is too narrow to show its contents without truncating some values).

So I finally figured out that the best thing to do for output is to export the data and print it from Numbers.

[Brendan]

Hi Cliff,

Can you please send me some screenshots showing the issue you’re having? Sometimes just having a screenshot makes it much easier for me to understand the problem.

My dad once had a problem with the Photos app where he would tell it to print in landscape orientation, but even though the paper was rotated correctly to landscape, the printout would display only in portrait, so the top and bottom of the photo was cut off. The solution was to reset the printing system by right clicking on the list of printers in the Printers & Scanners System Preferences app.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Cliff Tarrance]

Hi Brendan,

I sent you an email with the screenshots.

thanks,
Cliff

[Cliff Tarrance]

For the benefit of anyone reading this thread, Brendan helped me solve the problem via email support, and I will summarize the solution here.

It turns out that the cause of the problem was that I had a hidden calculation field in the first position of the form, which was throwing everything off. I think that’s kind of buggish behavior, but I never would have figured it out without Brendan’s help.

The solution was to to move the calculation field lower in the field list, after the fields that are included in the multicolumn view.

In case anyone is wondering, the purpose of the calculation field is for printing address labels. It concatenates into one text block the name and address values from the corresponding individual name and address element fields.

Thanks again for the help, Brendan!

[Brendan]

Hi Cliff,

Definitely biggish behaviour which I’ll address :-)

Thanks for your perseverance with this issue.

Brendan

[tonyt]

Hi Brendan
Just a thought. Would it be possible to have a scaleable printout option al la Numbers. OK the print would be smaller, but you could fit more in if chosen to. Are you allowed to pinch Apple code?
Cheers
Tony

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Brendan]

Hi Tony,

I have spent some time with the scale option on the print sheet, but things went all wonky when I enabled that. It’s something I have to put some more time into making work. It doesn’t seem to be a simple thing.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Author]

Posts