chrisr@cognos.UUCP (Christine Roine) (08/09/89)
Printing Problems ----------------- We have an application that prints out graphs. We have implemented printing as described in Chapter 16 of the Charles Petzold book produced by Microsoft, "Programming Windows". We have two printers, an Epson FX-85 and a postscript printer. When we print a couple of pages of graphs to either printer, things work just fine. However, when we increase the volumne (printing more than 3 pages or so), everything works fine with the PostScript printer, but with the Epson printer a couple of things go wrong: First, as soon as the "Cancel Printing" dialog box goes away (spooler is still running), if I open the File menu, the screen gets repainted in weird ways. Specifically, our document window gets painted in the background colour. It looks like Windows is out of memory. Even worse, part way through the printing, the printer begins printing junk. It prints a lot of bars mixed with a checker-board pattern for the remainder of the current page. Then it sends form-feeds instead of printing the subsequent pages. I notice that once printing is finished, the spooler icon never goes away. This problem is easy to reproduce. It happens whether or not I have the spooler enabled (spooler=yes and spooler=no in the win.ini file). I have checked for spooler problems using the WM_SPOOLERSTATUS message and found nothing. I have also tried this on another printer, an IBM Colour Printer (Black & White only) and the problem also occurs. I usually run Windows 2.03. I have tested the same scenario using Windows386 version 2.10, and the failure still happens but somewhat later. I have tried almost all the combinations in the printer setup box for the Epson printer. The problem happens later when I switch to a lower resolution or to draft letters. No combination makes the problem go away. The problem doesn't occur at all with textual data. I can also reproduce the problem by printing a small graph over and over again. I start the print, wait for the "Printing..." dialog box to go away, and start the next print. I notice that each time the "Printing..." dialog stays up longer (12 seconds the first time, then 40 seconds, then 100 seconds, then 230 seconds) and on the fourth printout, I get junk. I have tried reproducing the problem with Excel, printing the same small bar graph over and over again. Excel works fine, and the "Printing..." dialog box stays up for about the same amount of time for each print. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be causing this? -- Christine Roine Cognos Incorporated S-mail: P.O. Box 9707 Voice: (613) 738-1440 x6111 3755 Riverside Drive FAX: (613) 738-0002 Ottawa, Ontario UUCP: decvax!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!chrisr CANADA K1G 3Z4