Setting Up Your Printers (User, System Administrator, and Flexfields Help)


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Setting Up Your Printers

Oracle Applications provides you with predefined printer types, print styles, and printer drivers. Use the Printer Types form to query the combinations of print style and printer driver that support each type of printer you may have. Customize the predefined components as desired or if necessary. See: Customizing Printing Support in Oracle Applications.

Attention: Predefined printing components may have to be modified for different printer types and/or operating platforms.

Forms for Defining Printer Support

You use four forms to define printer support.

Printer Types

You must define any printer types (i.e., manufacturer and model) used at your site that are not shipped with Oracle Applications. Also, for each print style you wish to output from a particular printer type, you need to assign to the printer type a combination of a print style and a printer driver.

Printers

When you register a printer with Oracle Applications, you identify the printer by its operating system name, and assign it a printer type.

You can only register a printer as a previously defined printer type.

Print Styles

To generate a report, the print style values for columns and rows are passed by the concurrent manager to Oracle Reports (i.e., values for the PAGESIZE token). A print style determines the dimensions of your report, or the:

Number of lines per page (number of rows or page height).

Width of each line (number of columns or page width).

Printer Drivers

A printer driver includes the initialization and reset strings that format and restart a printer. You need a defined printer driver for each print style that you plan to use with a specific printer type, on a specific platform.

Printing Setup Interrelationships

In the diagram below, a single line indicates "one" and three lines branching out indicate "many". For example, a printer can only be one printer type, and a printer type can be assigned to many printers.

Many printers can be registered as a particular printer type.

A printer type can support multiple print styles.

A printer driver must be assigned to a printer type for each print style you wish your output to be in.

See: Overview of Printers and Printing

Figure 1 - 23.

Printer Setup Information Is Cached On Demand

Printer setup information; Printer Type definitions, Print Style definitions, and Printer Driver definitions, are read into memory (cached) the first time the information is required to print a program's output.

The cache area that holds printer setup information is private to the concurrent managers. Printer setup information remains cached in memory until the concurrent managers are restarted, when the values are erased and new values are cached (read into memory).

Attention: You should issue a Restart concurrent manager command for all currently active managers whenever you edit an existing Printer Type, Print Style, or Printer Driver (unless the type, style or driver has not been referred to or cached yet).

See: Controlling Concurrent Managers