Problem printing on custom carbon slip

Good day,

I have a Panasonic KX-P1121 dot matrix printer attached to a printer server and a Windows 2003 box hosting an application which issues web application login pin slips to clients. The dot matrix printer is printing continuous feed of carbon slip sheets, in which each slip sheet is measured 14cm height x 20 cm width in size.

I wrote a simple application with VB 6 using Data Report designer. I trield to set the report width and height to the actual size of a standard slip. But when it prints to the dot matrix printer, somehow the user id and the PIN was printed on the correct position for only the first sheet. Subsequent sheets have observed the user ID and PIN being printer slightly higher to the position it was supposed to be printed.
It is observed that these details were printed higher and higher for subsequent sheets too.

I tried testing the print from my local PC attached to a local printer with the exact same model. It was working well. But when I deployed the program to client side, the problem occurs no matter how hard I tried to adjust the width and height properties in the Data Report designer. I even tried to hard code these properties programmatically but the problem still persists.

Can anybody help me? Thanks in advance.

When I did some VB to print labels on continuous form stock, I had to setup the printer as a generic/text only and bypass the windows printer drivers. Proportional fonts don't do well with preprinted forms.

Other things to look for, most printers allow you to set LPI in the printer, maybe the failing printer is configured different from your test printer. Also compare the printer settings you're using between the two locations.

Thanks for the reply. But how do I configure the generic/text as mentioned? Do I use coding to do that? or do I configure it via windows' control panel?

Hi all,

I have tried another way to print content on exact location without using DataReport Designer. I used Printer.Print,Printer.CurrentX and Printer.CurrentY methods to pinpoint exact location for printing on preprinted forms.

While this works on all pages printed, the printer skips a sheet after completed printing every page before starting the next. I tested with 3 pages. The first one printed successfully at the right position, but then the printer skips one whole sheet and started to print the second page on the next sheet. I already set the following in my code before entering the loop:



The printer seems to treat the continuous feed as an A4 paper. Is there any ways to stop printer from skipping an entire sheet before printing the next page? Please help. Thank you.

Hi all. I've got it solved.

Seems like the printer cannot accept custom size setting via code. So I treated 2 sheets as a single letter sized paper to print out.

Used Printer.Print instead of DataReport and it worked!

I'm glad you found a solution. Printing layout problems are nearly impossible to debug without actually seeing the printer output