XPRINT SET COLORMODE - problem report
From
Wolfgang =?utf-8?Q?=CE=95nzinger?=@21:1/5 to
All on Fri Mar 19 14:00:57 2021
In case anybody else encounters this ...
One of my programs is a GIS (Geographic Information System), and users sometimes need to print the map. Coloured.
Until about a year ago, I used XPRINT ATTACH CHOOSE for printer selection,
and then the various XPRINT methods for actual printing.
Since XPRINT ATTACH CHOOSE is quite limited in various ways, I then
replaced it with the native method PrintDlg(). After the selection, the settings were applied to XPRINT, like:
IF (@pDevMode.dmFields AND %DM_COLOR) THEN
XPRINT SET COLORMODE @pDevMode.dmColor
END IF
And now the problem started. As far as I can tell, only about 10% of my
users were concerned, and I couldn't ever reproduce the problem with any of
my printers myself. However, those 10% reported that the printer only
prints in b/w, even when they had chosen color mode in the printer
selection dialog. The situation was always the same: b/w is the default for
the printer, and the document setting "colored" is ignored.
I tried this and that, like ResetDC() and DocumentProperties(), to no
avail. Finally I decided to eliminate XPRINT completely and rewrite it all using only GDI functions. Big surprise: no more problems.
Regarding the colormode, there must be a bug in XPRINT SET COLORMODE. The
weird thing is that this seems to affect only a couple of printer models,
one of them being Kyocera TASKalfa 4052ci. And XPRINT ATTACH CHOOSE seems
to set the colormode in a slightly different way - which makes the whole
thing work.
COLORMODE is the only property affected, others like ORIENTATION or COPIES
work perfectly in whatever situation.
Observed with PB/Win9 and PB/Win10.
Maybe this helps others who face the same problem. And, if dreaming is
allowed: maybe this will be fixed in PB/Win11.
Cheers Wolfgang
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