LiveCode Forums.

Greetings All,

I posted earlier but got no response. I'm hoping that someone can help.

Several years ago I wrote a fairly complicated program for a company to manage inventory and do estimation proposals.

There are a number of reports that need to be printed. Everything works fine in XP, but VISTA has screwed all the printing routines up royally.

Sometimes when printing, the whole system crashes. Sometimes I get a "Revolution Engine for Win32 has stopped working" error message. Sometimes a report will print partially or not at all. Once this happens, then the printer spews out page after page of empty sheets of paper.

The only solution is to quit the program, if it hasn't already quit on its own and start up again.

I have been trying to isolate this problem for over a month, and I am going bonkers.

The problem is the same on HP, Epson, and Canon printers, so I don't think it is an incompatible printer problem. Printing from other applications using VISTA on the same printers works fine.

I have discovered a few things that decrease the frequency of the problem, but offer no final cure.
1. Change fields with a borderwidth of 2 to a borderwidth of 1.
2. When opening a stack to print, don't use "open card x of stack XYZ" - instead use "open stack XYZ" and then "go to card x"
3. Avoid use of the "answer printer" command.

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on my problem.

I am using version 2.8.1.


Thanks,
John Miller

I've worked only on Vista computers for the last 6 months, and in general Rev standalones are well behaved on Vista. I must admit my print scripts are very basic and are probably more simple than yours are, like this::

on mouseUp
answer printer
open printing with dialog
print card from 20,40 to 600,800
close printing
end mouseUp

I've had two rev standalones that crashed Vista (had to power off).
The first where I didn't clear pending messages before closing the standalone.
The second was printing related, and seemed to occur when I was experimenting with "formatForPrinting".
Both were sporadic and difficult to reproduce.

I was using Rev Studio 2.8.1 at the time.

Paul

The printing we do from our application is not at all normal, but is well behaved on XP and on Mac OS X.

Until now.

Suddenly, even on XP, we're getting crash reports from some of the newer, smaller HP printers (1010 in particular seems to be a problem).

On Vista, the problems were awful at first, but seem to be getting better over time. We haven't changed the _way_ we print from our application, so someone is fixing something - either Rev is changing, Vista is changing or HP is changing.

Someone needs to write a Revolution Printing Bible - it seems that it's still to much of a black art.

On HPs site, the 1010/1015 series seem to be ca. 2003. Some web reports seem to indicate USB conflicts with XP/SP3 and USB printers in general. There haven't been any driver updates since 2003 (likely part of the problem).

The HP Universal print driver doesn't support the 1010.

Once again, I'll plea for the Printing with Rev Bible - if we understood a bit more what Rev is doing when it prints - at the system call level - it might be possible to see these problems in our applications and handle them gracefully.


The great challenge is that you simply can't test (and shouldn't have to) with every printer on the market. The standard feedback is always "but I can print from Word just fine".

Anybody write a "virtual printer tester" that would allow us to install drivers and emulate printing?