Oracle E-Business Suite offers two printing solutions to handle all your printing requirements. For most printing needs, the Pasta Utility offers quick setup and easy maintenance. For additional flexibility, Oracle E-Business Suite allows you to define your own printer drivers and print styles.
To set up your printers using Pasta, see Printer Setup with Pasta.
Note: Pasta is required to print using UTF8.
To set up your printers using a custom solution, see Customizing Printing Support in Oracle E-Business Suite.
When you run an Oracle E-Business Suite report, Oracle Reports generates and formats the output. A completed report is sent to the operating system by the concurrent manager, which issues an operating system print command, or calls a custom print program or subroutine that issues an operating system print command.
Oracle Reports includes page break, carriage return, line feed, text bold on/off, and text underline on/off instructions within the output file. The values are retrieved from a SQL*ReportWriter (SRW) driver file.
When the report is generated for online viewing, Oracle Reports uses the SRW driver named by the print style in the Print Styles form.
When the report is to be printed, Oracle Reports uses the SRW driver named by the Oracle E-Business Suite printer driver in the Printer Drivers form.
The dimensions of a report are determined by the columns and rows values in the print style, defined using the Print Styles form. These values override the width and height values in an SRW driver file.
When a report program finishes running, the concurrent manager prepends an initialization string, and appends a printer reset string to the output file. Both strings are defined using the Printer Drivers form.
An Oracle E-Business Suite printer driver is invoked by issuing a print command or by calling a print program or subroutine.
When the printer driver method is Command, the concurrent manager can issue an operating system print command and arguments, entered in the Arguments field of the Printer Drivers form.
When the printer driver method is Program, the concurrent manager can call a custom print program, named (along with its path) in the Name field of the Printer Drivers form. Arguments to the program may be entered in the form's Arguments field.
When the printer driver method is Subroutine, the concurrent manager calls a predefined Oracle E-Business Suite subroutine that passes a print command and arguments to the printer via the operating system. The subroutine name is entered in the Program Name field of the Printer Drivers form.
The concurrent manager may provide values for four arguments to an operating system print command or custom print program:
the name of the file to be printed
the operating system name of the target printer
the title of the file, which appears on a header page if it is printed
the number of copies to be printed