Upgraded to ver 7; now printout garbled

July 20, 200421 yr

Newbies

This is an odd one. I have been creating FM files since it was plain FileMaker, so am not a newbie. I recently posted a problem I had where FileMaker would not print correctly to an HP Business InkJet 2200, although none of my other apps had this problem. I was able to print to a Canon ImageRunner 5020 laser printer. Both of these printers are on our hospital's network.

Still unable to resolve the original problem, I upgraded to FM Pro 7 last week. Without doing any tweaking of print setups, FileMaker now prints perfectly to the BI 2200; but guess what? Now FM won't print correctly to the Canon laser printer! I tested this on an FM Pro template in addition to files I've created.

I noticed that numbers print correctly. However, text fields (including field labels)print gibberish characters. For example, PO becomes 32, Vendor becomes 9HQGRU. I am using mostly common fonts, such as Ariel.

As far as printer settings go, I am very limited in what I can change as they are used over the network by a great many other applications and users.

I am at a loss as to what to do. Can anyone help?

July 22, 200421 yr

Author
Newbies

Problem resolved! In case anyone else experiences this: We connect to most of our printers through a print server, and when adding one to our individual printer folders, we just navigate to that print server, select the network printer by name and we're good to go. The confusing thing was that all my other applications had no problem printing - just the upgraded FileMaker.

What we finally did was add the printer to my system by its IP address. This gave me the option of having the driver installed (or rewritten to) directly on my computer. Now FileMaker prints perfectly to the ImageRunner whether I use the original "printer" or the one I set using the IP address. I still don't understand why it worked - can a driver be partially corrupted? No idea. It will have to remain one of those computer mysteries - at least to me!