Sage 100

Client upgraded to 2017. Now having an issue with their thermal label printer when printing Shipping Labels from S/O. They preview the label and then print multiple copies from the preview window. Of course, this worked just fine before the upgrade. Now, it no longer defaults to the thermal label printer and they have to choose their custom label stock from the 'stocks' list under Options in Printer Preferences. This is a lot of steps for their users. Has anyone run into this and have a solution for me? It's a Zebra using a ZDesigner ZT2 driver. Thanks!

Does it help to save the printer in the Crystal Report?

You might try the Seagull Scientific / Bartender driver. I have had several issues with the Zebra drivers and always install the Bartender driver for label printing.

If the problem is page size I'd disassociate with a printer and hard code the dimensions within the .rpt We've seen weird things with labels being rotated with upgrades... and had to redesign everything rotated 90 degrees.

@ToddMartin knows a lot about this subject.

So, yes, I did have to disassociate the printer, hard code the dimensions in the report, flip the text and basically recreate the label. That part is done and working properly. This print from preview thing *almost* seems like a Windows issue - where the default settings from Windows are being ignored when launching printer setup from within Sage but nothing has changed on the workstation except for the 2017 workstation setup.

Actually I am working on a similar issue, although I don't have the solution completely tested with the customer yet, I believe the solution is to set the default label size with the windows printing preferences. Setting the label size and printer in Crystal won't work. Depending on the printer, Seagull specifically, you must go into the driver's specific printing preferences to set the default label size. Otherwise most other zebra type printers, setting the default label size in the printing preferences should work.

If you need to print from preview it will display based on the printer settings when you click on preview. So check that the printer settings are correct before you click on preview. If you didn't click preview, would it print correctly without issues? Ideally, I don't like having to have users select the number of copies they want. I prefer to setup the report to figure out how many I need (if possible). Don't know if this is an option and have them bypass the whole preview process.

@Todd Martin - we are hosting a client who has multiple remote offices, and when they attempt to print 350 labels through the report (without doing the preview) the software sends each print job for all 350 individually - one at a time. Which means - it takes a very long time for those jobs to travel over the internet and sometimes there is a very large delay before labels start printing. When we do the print preview, and then tell it how many labels to print, it sends only 1 job, and starts printing immediately.

What is being used to host? Citrix, Terminal Services, Applianz? Might be another way to connect the printer. I haven't seen remote printing react this way. Curious to know if others have and if so with what type of hosting technology.

We are using Terminal Services. But it doesn't really matter - the jobs are indeed being sent individually if you code the number of labels into the print job. So rather than mgs of data going across the internet, when you do the print preview and then select the number of labels, it is more like kb's of data across the internet. It's a truly remarkable difference in the way Sage sends the print jobs to the printer when you do it through a preview.

Can you clarify ""code the number of labels into the print job"". The size of the file should be the same in a Preview and then Print as it would be a direct Print. Both methods from a TS viewpoint are the same in the way it process. It is going to a printer driver that is redirected. The raw print file would be identical, if the settings for the printer was consistently used the same way for both methods. If you are printing only a section of the whole print job, then yes it would only be KB but if you add all the KB it should be the same as the Whole which might be MB. While you might wait a little longer for transfer of data you don't have the manual work between print jobs. If you are doing additional steps in between then yes it could be different. I would personally set it up to print the total labels based on the number of packages, if this was shipping data entry, so that the single print job would have 1 label per package. No printing x copies of one label. If Shipping says there are 15 boxes, I print 15 labels.

The volume our client is printing is what makes the difference. They are printing hundreds or thousands of an item label or a shipping label at one time. Based on the way Sage generates the labels, when printing direct from the application, is that it will generate the number of pages/copies then send it to the printer (spooling could change the steps slightly). The point is, is that if a user requests, as an example 300 labels for an item, there are 300 pages of text vs if you select preview then print and request 300 copies, one page is sent but the printer is told to repeat that page 300 times. In the end it is a lot less data. Printing small numbers direct from Sage works great, just large quantity of labels cause the issue and printing direct from Sage is always ideal, just doesn't work very effeciently in this instance. I don't know if this is why Dawn's client is processing it this way, I imagine that it is probably related to a similar situation.

Dan, Now that makes sense. What you are saying is that you are only sending one page and then tell the printer to print it 300 times which would only make the print job be the size of the one page. The printer in turn prints the same file 300 times. This isn't an issue of Preview vs Print or anything specific to how Sage would print. If I had 300 page word file with the same page content on each page the print job would be big. But if I have one page in word and tell the printer to print 300 times, it would be small. I think I was caught up on the comment that it prints differently from preview than print and that just didn't make sense to me.

@ToddMartin Labels print fine if they print directly w/o previewing first. They also print correctly if they print from preview w/o accessing the printer setup. However, if they preview the label, access printer setup and then try to print (even without changing the number of copies) the label prints incorrectly - it is being formatted for 8.5 x 11 page size and ignores the Windows default settings that are defined under Control Panel for this printer, which includes a custom stock size for the label. I really appreciate all the ideas being passed around here!

Is the form setup for the page setup to be ""No Printer""? Do you have dissociate Formatting Page Size and Printer Paper Size checked or unchecked? In reading your response, is there a possibility that the driver is being changed when they go into the settings when they preview? When I setup Thermals I have better results when I specifically set a printer, (if barcodes are used, use the driver to print the barcodes) and set the page options to the size of the label.

Based on my experience and testing, the printer and the paper size defined for the Crystal report does not affect the printing from preview. It appears that somehow, Crystal and/or windows is saving the settings per the application. I have duplicated the issue with a PDF printer and was able to save my settings specific to the application so that the settings would default correctly, but not all printers/printer drivers are created equal:) Label printers are especially finicky when it comes to these types of settings.

The ""printer"" is the print driver software. Have you tried any alternative compatible drivers?