Chapter 7: Printing

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Overview

Oracle Applications, in this society that is purported to be nearing the paperless age, is capable of generating an immense amount of paper output. This output does not magically appear from out of the computer screen onto the users desktop; it gets there by way of some printer somewhere. It is astounding that in a day when CDs are the main writable and removable storage media — a media that costs so little, is very durable, portable, and a means of so many archival solutions — that the majority of the end users choose to print the output of a report, punch holes in it, and place it in a three ring binder on a shelf, simply because that is the way things are done. For the foreseeable future, the Oracle Applications administrator will have to deal to some extent with printing and printing issues.

An Oracle Applications report can be printed on virtually any printer that will accept print requests from the OS's command line. Even if this is not the means by which the end user submits the print job, in the long run, the print job gets to the printer via an Oracle Applications driver.

Printers utilize a hardware method, a software method, or a combination of methods for controlling the printing attributes like paper size, orientation, vertical and horizontal spacing, font sizes, and number of characters per inch or per line. Historically more of the control was done with hardware, however, most modern printers rely on some form of printer control language (PCL) to initialize the printer and set up many of the printing attributes. These languages typically consist of a predefined sequence of commands concatenated into a string and appended to the beginning (and occasionally part of a string to the tail) of a document. Oracle Applications' printer drivers for flat text report printing use these predefined strings. PostScript, alternatively, embeds the printer control information within the document itself (somewhat like idiot print for anyone who has ever done mainframe COBOL programming). Nearly any printer can understand the PCL command string. Far fewer can understand the PostScript commands. Many can understand either.

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