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DreamCat
Judging by a few of the questions we've
received, we thought it might be good to reiterate a few things about
DreamCat and your Cat's print files. Please refer to the Help files in
DreamCat for a little more extensive discussion of these topics.
GETTING IT
RUNNING
If this is the first
time you've launched DreamCat, you will be presented with a couple of
dialog boxes asking you to choose your default printer and your
default font. These selections will become the default for every
report in DreamCat. However, you can change these selections on an
individual basis for each report if you need.
PRINT (OR
SPOOL) FILES IN CAT'S
One of the most
important things to understand is that DreamCat works with spooled
Cat's files. Many Cat's clients already print their reports to disk as
a matter of course. So, if you're used to sending your reports
directly to the printer, you'll need to change your strategy. Why
would you want to do this? The most important reason is actually to
save time. When you print a report in Cat's, all the calculations
needed to make up that report are being done at the time the report is
printed. If anything goes wrong with your printer, you must start
again. If, instead, you print the reports to disk you can simply send
the report to the printer again. You don't have the computer's
processor time wasted again recreating the report. With DreamCat, you
can select any range of pages to print you need. The report has
already been created in Cat's, so we're just working with that report
to allow you to print as much or as little of the report as you
need. If you're unfamiliar with spooled files in Cat's, refer to your
Cat's documentation. In the older versions, you can go to Database
Reports, then choose 13) Save Printer Output to a File. You'd then
choose 1) Open a print file. You give the file a name. Once that's
done, all reports you print go to that file name on disk instead of to
the printer until you explicitly close the print file or you exit
Cat's. You can then return to Database Reports and choose to print the
file. Release 3.1 and later allow you to access the same function from
almost all screens by using F2 Printing Options. The bottom line here
is that you must print your Cat's reports to a file before you can
print them using DreamCat. Once that's done, you can print them to any
printer attached to your computer or network.
INVOICES,
STATEMENTS, & CREDIT MEMOS
There have also been
questions about invoices, credit memos, and statements. These reports
are a special case. Each Cat's client has these three reports
customized for their company. They are fixed-depth reports. There are
no formfeeds used to delineate the end of a page. Each page is x
number of lines deep. In order to print these files to anything
besides a dot-matrix printer, you must know the line depth of the
report. You can experiment to figure that out or you can contact Cat's
and ask them to tell you how many lines are printed per page for each
of these reports. One way to more quickly figure out the lines per
page is to actually measure the depth of your form. Since a dot-matrix
printer is set to print six (6) lines per inch, you can simply
multiply six times the length in inches of your form. So, if your form
is eleven (11) inches deep, you’d end up with 66 lines in page
depth. You can use that as a starting point in the Lines Per Page
field in the Reports Configuration screen. You'll notice in DreamCat
that you must fill in the Lines Per Page field in the Report
Configuration screen for these reports to print correctly. In just
about all other reports, we can figure out where to break the page by
looking for the formfeed character embedded in the report. Since
invoices, statements, and credit memos have no such embedded
character, there's no way for us to figure this out on the
fly. Additionally, since each Cat's client's reports are customized,
there's not much way we can help you figure this one out.
Continuing with the
discussion of invoices, etc. let's look at why you may not ever want
to print these through DreamCat except as a proofing method. Each
invoice is customized for you in its spacing in order to fit your
preprinted forms. When you try to print the same report to a laser
printer, you lose the size and pitch of the print you'd get with a
dot-matrix printer. All Cat's reports use the space character to line
up columns. This is why you can't use Times Roman (for instance) to
print your reports and expect the columns to line up. Times Roman is a
proportional font. Each character is a different width. Cat's reports
rely on fixed-pitch fonts in order to line up correctly. Many other
software packages you use make use of the tab character to line up
columns. Built into the program is the ability to calculate where each
column should begin. Cat's has no such capability. Consequently, if
you want to print to anything other than a dot-matrix printer, you are
restricted to a fixed-pitch font. This is not a limitation of DreamCat. We
simply must use what we get from Cat's in order to print to other
printers. Could you redo your forms in order to print to a laser
printer? Yes, it's possible. However, there are other considera-tions. Usually,
you need more than one copy of an invoice. While you can tell DreamCat
to print multiple copies of a report, the report would be printed all
the way through before starting the next copy. This means collating
the copies after the fact. For larger publishers this could mean an
increase in the time it takes to get invoices ready to send. Unless
you wanted to buy pre-collated, colored paper you'd also be left with
multiple copies of one color. No pink copy to the warehouse, yellow to
bookkeeping, etc. Your best bet would be to find out how many lines
are printed on each page of your invoice, set that up in DreamCat,
then try printing a few invoices to see what it would look like. If
you really want to switch to using a laser printer for your invoices,
you'll probably have to get Cat's to re-customize your invoices to
space the form to fill the page more completely. Only you can decide
if this approach is useful for your company. DreamCat was not designed
primarily to print these custom reports. It was designed to print the
big, bulky reports we all need, like month-end reports. Also, the
marketing department might need just a few pages of a report on one
customer. DreamCat makes it easy to lift those few pages and get them
printed quickly. Keep in mind that we cannot alter your custom
reports. This would have to be a new customization by Cat's to get
your invoices, statements, and credit memos to line up correctly on
non-pinfeed paper.
We believe we have a
very useful product in DreamCat. If you have any problems in getting
the product to work, please don't hesitate to ask. It would be
helpful if you would email or fax a description of the problem. This
allows you to think out the exact sequence of events you are trying to
accomplish and helps us better understand the problem you're facing.
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