Printing from Uniface

Uniface supports printing from form and report components, which determine the content and layout of the data to be printed.

The appearance of the printed output depends on other factors, such as the operating system, the printer, and Uniface font mappings. Uniface uses device translation tables to handle output to printers, and print job models to define named collections of printer attributes.

Printing itself is handled by the operating system and the output device.

Enhanced printing provides support for printing text in proportional fonts and printing in a layout that better matches what is displayed on the screen (widget-dependent printing).

Uniface also supports printing to PostScript. PostScript files can be directed to a third-party utility for printing or conversion to PDF. This is useful for batch PDF generation, but also provides enhanced printing capabilities on non-Windows platforms. However, Unicode is not supported in PostScript output.

Printing Process

The basic print process is as follows:

  1. A print command is issued, either by the ^Print structure editor function or by a ProcScript print or print/ask statement.
  2. Unless the print statement has been used alone, a dialog is displayed. This enables the user to choose the print mode (what gets printed) and print job model (printer and layout attributes).
  3. Uniface builds a temporary file using the specified print job model.
  4. Unless otherwise specified by the print job model, Uniface issues the applicable operating system command to submit the file for printing.
  5. The operating system submits the file to the printer.
  6. The printer interprets and transcribes the file.

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