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Former Member
Feb 22, 2011 at 08:23 PM

Printer output incorrect/too small after upgrading to VS 2010 Crystal

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I have a Windows Form application that was originally written using .net 3.5 and the version of Crystal Reports that came with Visual Studio 2008. When the VS 2010 release of Crystal Reports came out, I upgraded the application to .net 4/VS 2010 and the new Crystal release.

This application prints checks on blank check stock, so alignment of the output has to be very exact to print the checks correctly. It prints the reports using the PrintToPrinter() method of the ReportDocument class.

In the original version of the program, I had everything aligned correctly in the check report. After updating the application to the latest Crystal release,but making no changes to the report itself, I noticed that the alignment of the checks report was incorrect.

After comparing the output, I was able to determine that the new output is slightly shrunk compared to old output, almost as if it is scaling the report in some way.

I opened the report in the new report designer and verified that all page size and margin settings were correct/the same as before, and they were. The printed output is smaller than it should be based on how the report is designed. I tried adjusted the paper size, and also tried the "Dissociate Formatting Page Size and Printer Paper Size" to see if I could somehow adjust for the scaling, but nothing I tried was successful.

Our check printer is a HP LaserJet 5Si. During my investigation into the problem I discovered that if I printed the report to a pdf printer (PDFCreator) the resulting pdf did not have the same scaling/shrinking problem that I get when the report is sent directly to the LaserJet. I also printed a page from the pdf to the LaserJet using Acrobat Reader, and the output was as I expected it to be.

I only seem to be seeing the scaling/shrinking problem when I send the report directly to the LaserJet. Is there some new setting that I'm overlooking that would be applying some sort of report-wide scaling? Any other ideas as to why this is happening?