TECH TIP: Printed Paper and Exact Object Positioning

ReportBuilder is designed to position objects exactly on the page. The issue is that the printer drivers often have bugs and the printer hardware itself can introduce inaccuracies.

When you define a report in ReportBuilder you define the paper size and margins. The report layout contains objects that have left, top, width and height.

Internally ReportBuilder stored all of this information in microns (thousandths of a mm). This exceeds the precision of any printer device).

When printing to the printer, the report layout information is mapped to the printer. Each printer has an unprintable page gutter area, usually about 1/4 inch on each side. This information is retrieved by ReportBuilder via a Windows API call. ReportBuilder uses this information to adjust the report layout to fit exactly on the page.