18 Support for Postscript Printers

This chapter describes Oracle BI Publisher support for postscript printers.

18.1 Introduction

PDF is a popular output format for business reports and is printable from viewer software such as Adobe Reader. However, some reports require printing directly from the report server. For example, paychecks and invoices are usually printed as scheduled batch jobs. Some newer printers with Postscript Level 3 compliant Raster Image Processing can natively support PDF documents, but there are still many printers in business use that only support Postscript Level 2 that cannot print PDF documents directly.

This release introduces native support for PostScript Level printers. Previously, to enable printing from the BI Publisher server to a PostScript printer a filter had to be configured to invoke a third-party utility to perform the conversion. Now BI Publisher provides the utility to convert PDF to PostScript 2.0. If your printer supports PostScript 2.0, you will no longer be required to use a third-party utility to print directly from the server.

18.2 Setting Up Your Print Server to Use the Converter

The conversion utility is provided as an option from the Filter list of the Print Server definition page:

Log in to Oracle BI Publisher as an Administrator.
From the Admin tab, under the Delivery heading, select Printer.
Select an existing print server, or to add a new one, click Add Server.
Under the General properties, select PDF to PostScript from the Filter field list. The following screenshot shows the Filter field list of the print server definition.

For information on setting up the other fields in the Print Server definition page see the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide.

After completing all other required fields for the print server, you will be able to schedule reports to print directly from the BI Publisher server to any printer in your system that supports PostScript Level 2.

18.3 Limitations

This release of the PDF to PostScript converter has the following limitations:

Only PDF version 1.4 or earlier is supported. This is also the currently supported version of the Oracle BI Publisher PDF output.
CID fonts, which are used mainly to support languages with large sets of glyphs like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, are only supported when embedded in the PDF.
Transparent and half-tone renderings are not supported.
DeviceN color space is not supported.
Shading patterns are not fully supported.
Vertical writing is not supported.