Inter Character Spacing in JADE Printed Output

[ConvertFromOldNGs]

by J Carrot >> Thu, 12 Oct 2000 4:00:26 GMT

When printing from JADE the spacing between characters when using
a proportional font is, in many situations, not 'attractive'. It
is more pronounced with smaller font sizes.
For our application we cannot predict/control the printer or even
the font the user will select for reporting. We have had negative
comment on the look of text on documents due to this problem and
require a better quality of output for routine output (while you
wait) semi formal documents.
The response received from the plant on this was:

"Jade printing is based on metafiles in order to provide device independent
output and to handle the fact that we are constructing the output
based on
the displayed version (painter etc) which we must reproduce on the printer.
Unfortunately, metafiles have a bug in that the spacing between
each
character is stored in the metafile as an integer rounded from a
real. When
the metafile is drawn on a printer, it is scaled up many times as
a printer
has a much greater resolution. Therefore, the inter-character
spacing
rounding is exaggerated, particularly for small fonts. For
Microsoft to fix
this, they would have to change the format of their meta-file,
which
obviously they are not about to do. "

This must be a common problem to many JADE applications, what
solutions have others come up with?

[ConvertFromOldNGs]

by Craig Shearer >> Thu, 12 Oct 2000 19:31:38 GMT

Hello Mr. Carrot...

I agree this is a problem, and has always been there. I have also been frustrated with this in the past, and am a little puzzled by the response given by the plant. I must admit to never having had to implement printing in any other environment, so I'm not sure of the technical difficulty of solving this problem. However, that said, other environments seem to offer device indepentent printing (such as VB, etc.) and they get around the problem, so it can't be THAT hard!

I've always thought that it would be very difficult to develop a system in JADE that gave you true letter quality output. From experience I know that some fonts work better than others for this, but as you say, you don't have any control over the user's choice of font for printing.

An approach I've tried in the past with success is to bypass JADE's native printing altogether and use an OCX control to do it. The one I tried was VSPrint (I think, from memory) and this gives you MUCH more control over printing. You can even design your own print preview dialog (which is something that you can't do in JADE), and it's also faster! The only downside is having to pay for, and install an OCX. (Though, last time I checked, there was a free download trial version of the VSPrint OCX.)

Just my 2 cents worth...

Craig.