Overlay position is different in AFP viewer than when printed

[fjleon]

Following my question about multiple overlays on a same printer file, i am now looking to understand the following and make our life easier.

We are designing our overlays on microsoft word , printing them to the standard ibm afp 300 printer and installing them with iseries navigator.

When we run a report against the printer with the overlay, we open navigator and double click on the spool to see how it looks before printing.

The issue is that all the text that gets printed on the printer file itself is positioned differently on the afp workbench viewer than when it gets printed.

It seems like the printer emulator session applies its configured margin to the printed file itself and makes it rather difficult to design the position of the field values to print, since they don't look the same.

How do i emulate our current emulated printer settings on the printer file/program itself so when viewing it in navigator looks exactly the same as when printing it physically?

Thanks in advance

[NYCountryGal]

Re: Overlay position is different in AFP viewer than when printed

Try saving your overlay as a .AFP file instead of a .PRN file and set the Print text as graphics to *YES and see if that works. If you recently downloaded the latest versions of the AFP drivers - IBM made changes but the last I knew they hadn't published that information.

When we migrated to V6R1 - all of our forms printing went to hell real quick. I spent about two days pulling the hair out out of my head trying everything I had previously learned to resolve the issue with no resolution. Placed a call to IBM and one 30 minute call later we were back in business.

Let me know if this helped!

Roxann

[fjleon]

Re: Overlay position is different in AFP viewer than when printed

How would a file extension change things so much? Anyway, i went into Word, printed the first page as an overlay to the ibm afp 300 printer and saved it as afptest.afp. Print text as graphics was already on.

Used system navigator to import the file and tested my program with it. It didn't work. I will attach how the afp looks like in afp workbench and also how it looks when printed.

As you can see, in afp viewer it looks like crap, all misaligned, but once printed it looks perfectly. This makes testing really hard, since we must print the thing a thousand times in order to keep aligning it through the POSITION keyword in the printer file itself.

[NYCountryGal]

Re: Overlay position is different in AFP viewer than when printed

I don't use afp viewer to look at the spool file - I use iSeries Navigator....

When you have iNav open, go to basic operations, and then go to printer output and find your spool file - if your the one creating the spool file. Otherwise go to Printers, find the printer it was sent to and then find the spool file in question. Click on it to open and what you see on screen is what you should see when you print. I have never used AFP viewer -- we have the Infoprint software but none of us use it because we've gotten pretty good at creating overlays using word, the AFP print drivers and iNav.

As for your question on the file extension -- it was a phone conversation with IBM and the guy explained it to me but it was a year ago and I don't remember the reason. If I can dig up the information I will post it.

Roxann

[fjleon]

Re: Overlay position is different in AFP viewer than when printed

afp viewer and iseries navigator are the same thing, meaning that when you double click on navigator it actually launches afp viewer.

since the offset is exactly the same amount as the emulated printer session's margins i guess we are supposed to create a new printer with no margin. Still, when creating a reports it outputs it by default to our queue called SISTEMAS and i don't know if there's some configuring to be done on that queue first.