Blumenthal Software

Printout Support

Nothing Prints!!!

I get this kind of call for help fairly often, so it must be that I have not made the program user friendly enough so that people know what to do. Here are some steps to follow if nothing prints:

  1. Obviously, you will check your printer; make sure it is turned on and the cable is connected. Do not laugh; this sometimes is the problem. Use some other program, like your word processor to make absolutely certain.
  2. Check the PBS print job you are using. Go over the fields in the print job and make sure you are not doing something to prevent printing from occurring. The following paragraphs detail the most common problems.
  3. In the printjob Form page, make sure that you are sending output to the printer and not to a textfile. If you are sending to a textfile, then all the output is sent to an image file on the disk, just as though your word processor was saving a document without printing it.
  4. In the printjob's page setup page, check that the print width is more than zero. A line that has zero characters on it will not print.
  5. Also in the printjob's page setup page, consider switching your output from DOS to Windows. To do so, you can merely click the large yellow button in the middle of the page. That's all it takes. This is particularly true for Networked machines; outputting to DOS printer devices is not processed by Windows' methods for sending output to a network printer. You have a choice of methods; try the Windows method, please.
  6. Is it only one kind of printout? Or is it statements and insurance and ledger and practice summaries and lists?
  7. Try making the printjob settings as plain and basic as possible. In the Select page, do not select one provider; set it to print for all providers; and on the same page set the How to Select items to be printed field to Range of Dates. On the Form page, set it to do an autorun, not one at a time.

If the above advice does not help, you will have to gather more information and get that information to me. The following section describes what you need to send me.

Support for Printouts

In order to provide support for printouts, I generally need three things:

  1. Both the version and the release date of your program. For DOS programs, that is on the Main Menu screen. For PBSW, go to Main Menu, Help, About.
  2. Copies of the printouts, with the problems circled so I can see what's wrong.
  3. Information about the printjob used to create the printout:

WIDE Ledger Printout: In addition, especially if you are having difficulties with balances, it will be most helpful to me to see a complete printout of the ledger for a given account (a wide ledger report). If I can see the entire ledger, and watch how the program calculates the balance, I will see what is the problem. To do the printout of a complete ledger:

  1. Go to the patient’s record, to the ledger page, and click the Print button at the bottom of the ledger.
  2. Change the dropdown box to read Ledger instead of Insurance or Statement
  3. Click print (the entire ledger for that account will be printed, which is exactly what I need)
  4. You will be presented with the table of printjobs for Ledger printouts. Select one and print, then send that to me. If you possibly can, create and use a printjob configured as follows:: Lines on Page=55, Top=4; Bottom and Left=0; and Print Width=135. These settings will activate a special routine to print the report in Landscape mode. Also make sure that Form Feed is checked.

PrintScreens

When you need support, I will often ask to see a printscreen of a particular edit screen; this applies to both programs, DOS and Windows. A PrintScreen is a snapshot of your computer display. Every computer keyboard has a printscreen button, usually to the right of the F12 key on most standard keyboards. When you press that button, an image of the screen is printed in a DOS machine, so that's all you have to do. However, for PBSW or if you are running PBS DOS on a Windows machine, then the next paragraph applies.

In a Windows machine, the printscreen image is not printed, usually, but is sent to the Clipboard. You can print the contents of the clipboard by going into your word processor and pasting (the word processor's Edit menu choice permits you to paste). It is usually a good idea to set the word processor's font first to COURIER, size 9, so that the word processor will not be using a proportional font.

You might want to consider getting a printscreen utility to permit you easier ability to print the screen. I use Gadwin Printscreen (free for the downloading from http://www.gadwin.com/purchase/pricing.htm) and I recommend it.

WPRINT Utility

This utility program can be downloaded from the Download page. Place it anywhere on your hard disk; if you wish, you can put it into the same directory as your pbs program. WPrint does not change the way your main PBS program prints. However, it can help you to experiment with your printer, and can be used to read and printout the textfiles that the PBS programs (including the DOS programs) can be set to produce. WPrint can print either via DOS methods or via Windows methods. If you set WPrint to print to DOS, then no formatting will be done, and you will see how your printer treats plain text such as the usual printouts from pbs3 and pbsw. Note that some printers simply do not accept DOS output;

If you set Wprint to print to Windows, then WPrint will use Windows methods to set the courier font, and place each successive line down the page. The editboxes in the Windows Spacing box are set by WPrint, but you can override those settings and see how it changes the way your printer works. When a PBSW print job is set to use Windows printing methods, it uses the same printing methods as WPrint, so if you can get Wprint to print its sample text exactly 6 lines per inch, then you can get PBSW to do so as well, using the same settings in the Wprint edit boxes.

WPrint sets the Windows Spacing numbers by reading your printer's information from Windows. This usually works well, but you may want to change the top margin, and perhaps most especially the Fine Tuning. Fine tuning will move the image down progressively every Xth line. If you set Fine Tuning to 5, then the image will be moved down one pixel every five lines; if you set Fine Tuning to 10, then the image will be moved down one pixel every ten lines. This is a very small increment, but you may find it helpful.

Using WPRINT to Print Textfiles

You can use Wprint to print any textfile, such as the ones produced by pbs3 or pbsw. Both pbs3 and pbsw can be set to send the printout image to a file on the disk. That file is a plain text textfile, sometimes called an ASCII file. You can use Wprint to print that file by clicking on the Print Textfile button. (It is much faster to use your main PBS program to create a textfile than to have the program do the actual printing.)

 

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