[sims] Individual Report missing horizontal line after first report

[CAM]

OK this is a weird bug, really weird.

 

I have had a few cases where a horizontal line put in for decoration suddenly went missing in the middle of a print run. It started with some result slips that had a line separating headings from results and the line went missing halfway through batch printing. OK, fair enough, it wasn't important and won't be missed anyway.

 

Now I have a table with reports on, standard fare done many times before on A5 paper, two pages. The first student prints perfectly but any subsequent student has the top line of the table missing making the report look rubbish. I can't print it like this.

 

Has anyone else come across this problem before and know how to stop it? It isn't page margins as the table falls well within them and the first student prints fine anyway.

[CAM]

I've exported and previewed multiple students and it works fine. Somewhere between SIMS and my printer it is munching the first horizontal line in the document!

[starthms]

Sound like a printer drive problem, try updating the driver to the newest driver available.

[vikpaw]

Can you export all to a folder then print from there as a workaround? Then you have time to investigate later.

There bulk printing thread can help with a script to make it painless - be interested to see if this prints the line actually.

[LosOjos]

@CAM - I've had similar issues and found that forcing Word to start a new paragraph after each page break did the trick. It's tricky to explain, but if you go to 'Outline View' on your template, you will be able to see all page breaks (dashed lines) and paragraphs (grey bullet point in the left margin). You need to make sure page starts with a new paragraph.

 

For instance, imagine the '*' is a grey bullet point. This would be wrong:

*  This is some text on page 1.
  ------Page-Break------
  This is some text on page 2.

 

If you see that, you need to place your caret at the start of the text on the second page, hit enter to force a new paragraph, then backspace to shift it up to the [now blank] previous line. It should then look something like this:

*  This is some text on page 1.
  ------Page-Break------
*  This is some text on page 2.

 

As you're using tables for layout (as I do), then I imagine the first line of text on each page will be a '<>' tag so you can use that to enforce your paragraphs. If however each page's first element is the table itself, then I'd advise adding in a random piece of text above and making the font as small as possible and white (to make it invisible at print) to try this fix.

 

Hope that makes some sense!

[CAM]

I added a paragraph before the table but that didn't help. Neither did adding a faint grey line on the first page. The fix was weirder, I wrote some text at the top then added a solid black line with --- and autocorrect to create a solid line over the page. It worked.

 

The odd part is it worked fine on the NM's printer but not mine. I must have driver issues somewhere.

 

@vikpaw - Couldn't bulk print exported XML files without the script sadly.

Edited March 20, 2014 by CAM

[vikpaw]

you mean with teh script?

[CAM]

I couldn't try it, was running around like mad trying to get the reports ready and the workstation is locked down anyway (not admin).

[vikpaw]

Oh you mean they didn't plan any spare time in the reports cycle - i hate it when that happens!

[CAM]

Ohhh no, see my Twitter rant yesterday afternoon.