Oracle Applications Printer Drivers

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The printer drivers that are defined in Oracle Applications are used to initialize most common printers with certain predefined attributes and to specify which OS command will be used to route and initialize the printing of the report. Most of these drivers are defined via an Apps-based form with the necessary printer specific information defined and stored within one of the thousands of database tables. Three basic drivers would fulfill the vast majority of all of the reports in Oracle Applications. These driver types make use of the keywords: portrait, landscape, and landwide. While these keywords often are considered to be the paper orientation, in reality they are tied more closely with the number of lines per inch and characters per line rather than the positioning of the paper in the paper tray of the physical printer hardware, although a certain number of characters per line may equate roughly to one certain size or position.

For every Oracle Applications printer driver, there is an associated SQL Report Write (SRW) driver that is, in effect, a printer definition file that gets used by Oracle Reports at runtime. This is a flat ASCII character file that can be copied, edited, and saved as needed. These SRW drivers pertain only to an Oracle Reports output file and are used during the generation of the report output. Once the output is created, a printer driver is used to complete the sending of the output file to the printer. There are only a handful of highly generic print drivers and SRW drivers that apply to most popular makes and models of printers. There are certain conditions under which custom printer drivers need to be defined within the application and, in these cases, the initialization string needs to be obtained from the particular printer manufacturer (often this can be obtained from one of the printer's manuals rather than having to go directly to the manufacturer).

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