PDF Reports are off the page

[Rich Hartnett]

This is very weird, and I originally posted it in the web forum, but in light of the fact that I didn't get any responses, I'm thinking that it may be due to the fact that it is probably more of a "desktop / printing" issue than a web server issue.

Here's the deal - I have several applications that print reports over the web, and most of them have been working fine for over two years.

But today, I find that with all of the reports, when they open up in PDF on the web, they are forced off to the right/bottom side of the page, thus cutting off the right and bottom sides of the printed data.

Printing those same reports on the desktop side to a local printer works fine, and printing them to Adobe's distiller directly works fine, but when they are converted to a PDF through Alpha 5, they are "off the page."

(See attached pic of a report printed from the desktop locally, and the second one as a PDF through the Alpha.)

This appears to be a "global" issue, as the same thing happens in all of my applications, and they are not all located in the same folders or locations on the server.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem, or may have any suggestions as what to look for? Incidentally, I'm running the latest patch, but I tried rolling it back a few versions just as a test, and the problem was still there. I can't think of anything that would have been changed on my server in the past few days that would have caused this to happen, but it is causing me major problems.

[Mark Pearson]

Re: PDF Reports are off the page

Have you tried setting the report's page properties to shrink data (see attached) to see if that corrects the problem

[Rich Hartnett]

Re: PDF Reports are off the page

Hi Mark, and thanks for the reply.

I tried that and it seems to help. Although the report is still not exactly centered, at least it is all on the page now.

I am still befuddled by this though, because I haven't touched those settings since I first created those reports over 2 years ago, and they were all working fine until today.

If this is the cure, it looks like I will have to go back and make the change on all of the reports, which means I've got my work cut out for me.

But anyway, thanks a bunch. This just might solve my problem!

[glenschild]

Re: PDF Reports are off the page

Hi Richard

Have you had any adobe updates downloaded which may have affected the reader settings?

Regards

Glen

[Rich Hartnett]

Re: PDF Reports are off the page

I did do an adobe update, but that was about three hours ago, while I was trying to figure out what the problem was. In other words, the problem existed before I performed the update.

But that was for the Adobe 8.0 reader only.

[Rich Hartnett]

Re: PDF Reports are off the page - SOLVED!

During my crisis, I had forgotten that Selwyn had sent me a pre-release patch for an unrelated problem I was having with a "fatal error" message appearing while linking two simple grids together, and that patch was installed just a day before the problem started, so I have to think that the solving of one problem might have had an adverse effect on the second one.

The good news is that Selwyn fixed it for me late last night. He sent me a pre-release patch, along with the following explanation:

We were trying to fix another problem that we had internally on a project we were doing for one of our consulting clients.

We wanted a particular report to print at the top left corner of the page with an x and y margin of 0.

So we had made a change to try to get that to work - but we did not get the desired result, so we changed the code back to the way it was - and this has solved your problem.

So now there is always an implicit x and y margin on the page and there is no way to set this margin to 0.

If this is indeed the case, it would explain why my server was having this problem, but nobody else's was. In any case, Selwyn's second patch solved the problem, and now all my reports are showing up in PDF format correctly, as they were before this problem arose.

BTW, he sent me that patch at 9:30 pm. The man never stops working! As has been stated so many times before - "What fantastic customer service!"

[Mark Pearson]

Re: PDF Reports are off the page

There is another way that you can protect against this in future and that is to have your formatted page as a word document instead of a report. Then you could simply merge to this. I use this often as it makes it easier to make changes when a form design changes. I learnt when I created an OH&S management DB with all the forms built in, only to find the day I finished making them in reports, the company totally changed the format of every one.

The key problem associated with this merge style solution is that a merge document (to my knowledge) will only merge a flat file. All merge data needs to be in one row. By this I mean if you have a need for a realtionship where there are multiple attached records. EG 1 incident with 5 witnesses then this merge cannot be done unless you can get them all into one table. Given the lack of concern with memory nowadays a flatter approach to tables is just as feasible particularly for this reason. If I estimate there are no more than 3 addresses it can sometimes be better to have three address in the one table so that a merge can meet all the requirements.

Hope this made some sense.