Printed form vs Emailed Form/Smartforms

[catgirl1983]

We had an issue that when our invoice was emailed as a PDF, it was aligned along the left margin. Our consultants solved the issue by copying the form and bumping the left margins by .25 of an inch. This seems to work, but we're concerned about maintaining 2 copies of our invoice. Does anyone know of any other way around this? We would preferably, like to maintain, just one form.

Thanks in advance.

[BradB]

I don't understand what you mean by 'aligned along the left margin'? Does that mean that the print on the left side was cut off because the margins were moved on the new form? That is a ridiculous solution and you are correct to question it. I would question the quality of your 'consultant'.

Every printer has a printable area and you will find that area to be different sizes depending on the printer. Without seeing your setup, my guess is that your printing is being done on a different printer than your PDF conversion. First, check which device(s) are being used for printing and then compare to the device being used for PDF conversion. Make sure they're the same. If they are not the same and they can't be the same for some reason, you can still use a single form and have the print in the same location by using a printer shift to match up the printouts and ensure no loss of print, assuming the printable area is relatively the same size. You define printer shifts on devices in SPAD. You can either choose an existing device (being careful that you're affecting other prints as well) or create a new device and use that. Again, there's absolutely no reason for two different form definitions.

[catgirl1983]

It's the adobe acrobat pdf, that has everything aligned to the left margin. Nothing is cut off, but it looks horrible and depending on where you print it some of the text on the left might be cut off. We do have an email printer set up in spad. But that's just used occasionally. Most of the time, the invoices are emailed through our daily processing program. I did try putting a horizontal shift of 6 mm in our email printer, but that didn't seem to do anything. I suppose I could use the invoice form that has the margins bumped out by .25 inches, and use a negative horizontal shift for all my printers that actually do printing. But then I would need to maintain all my forms to have the margin adjusted out by .25 inches. I'm hoping that someone has a more practical solution.

[BradB]

I still think it's the printer definition, but without seeing the output, I can't get a picture of what you mean. Your output program and the subsequent processing for mode '5' is going to use a device for the conversion. Have you compared your output device on your e-mail records in table NAST with your output device on the printed records in NAST? Are they the same? If they aren't, print an invoice to the spool system, convert the spool to PDF manually, and view it. If the PDF looks good, you've got an issue with the conversion and the output device definition. It should be easy to resolve. One thing that happens when text is misaligned and not the correct font or size is that the output device in question either can't use the font or the correct initialization sequence has not been loaded.