Liveware Publishing Support Forum

Dear Friends,____ Enviro: R&R V9.0, Win98 SE____Problem:____ I created a simple report with only a Title band, and one image in that band. This image was fairly sizeable (approx 600K in bytes).____ I inserted the ^picture^ (actually a scanned single-sheet report) with no problem. I moved it, and fitted it with no problem.____ However, when I went to print the ^report^ (i.e., all image), it either crashed with the following error:____ ^General Print Spooler Error^ ____ or R&R ^hung^ with no evidence of the report coming out.____ I minimized R&R report designer, and examined my printer spoolers, and (when hanging) it was there but never printed.____ *IF* I re-size the image (using my digital camera software) to a size of about 300K, it prints properly ???____Question:__ Does R&R have some size limitation for proper image spooling/printing, or does WIN98 have some spooling size that is killing me ???____TIA,____-Mel Smith__

If you want to send the image file to me, I can try it here.__I was just able to successfully print a 750K image on a title band using an Hp6 driver under Win98 with both R&R Version 9 and Version 10. I tried using both inches and cms as my unit of measure and no failures here.______Kathleen__R&R Support

Kathleen,____ Thanks !____ I^ll e-mail it to you shortly.____ BTW, I tried printing the ^report^ with the printer spooler set to ^Print Directly to Printer^ and ^RAW^ and *this* worked ???______-Mel Smith__

Dear Friends,____ The previous post was a ^false alarm^.____ Turns out that the spooler error message *even* occured with the spooler turned off and the type of printing to ^RAW^.____ Hope Kathleen can help here !______-Mel Smith__

We had the same problem with a report that contained a large bitmap (~12 MB). Sometimes it would print, but usually the computer would hang or R&R would crash with the same "general print spooler" error message (if I recall correctly). Inserting the image as a jpg (which cut the size to < 1MB) made no difference, maybe because Windows converts the images to GDI calls, and so whether the original file is in a compressed format or not makes no difference. (I don^t know enough about Windows printing to know for sure, this is what I suspect). Unfortunately our conclusion was that there is an obvious problem R&R has with large images, and there didn^t seem to be anything we could do about it. I think one of the problems for Liveware is the source for graphics handling comes from a third party (I think a company called Snowbound software), and I recall reading a post from Liveware support that the original programmer had left the company, or some such thing. Whatever, there doesn^t seem to be anything being done to address R&R^s problems with large images unfortunately. __We did find that by saving the file as a metafile and pasting it as a metafile object, we could print it until the cows came home. Unfortunately at the present time there is no way to directly insert an image in metafile (or other vector graphics) format.

Dave,____ Thanks for your comments.____ Kathleen has been trying to help: I sent her the .jpg image, and she had identical problems. She (ultimately) converted my image to a .bmp file and said that she had got R&R V9 and V10 to print it !____ I searched the internet and got a jpg2bmp convertor and did the conversion but R&R was not able to print *my* .bmp file.____ However, I have a bunch of .jpg images (mostly color pictures from my digital camera). In every case R&R V9 was able to print the image. One of the images was 750K. Also, the I converted .jpg images to .tif and .gif and printed these conversions without a problem.____ What is going on here ???____ *My* working images are simple snail-mail forms that arrive at the company and are are scanned into a .pdf format then extracted into a .jpg image. R&R will not print the extracted .jpg image ! ____ I have will have about 8000 of these images whose titles will be kept in a database and must be able to be called up and viewed/printed at will by the user. (with no acrobat interaction -- simply and straightforward thru R&R).____ So, I *must* tell my user (a structural steel company) what the best format is for scanning and conversion. I will keep these 1-sheet ^form images^in a directory, and the titling of them in a database. Because they are black/white forms with typing filled-in, I guess that .gif would be the best ??____ Any thoughts would be welcome.____-Mel Smith__