Print Oracle Financials reports hassle-free with Lanboss Preview

Lanboss Preview

Lanboss Preview is a simple to use application that allows for printing of Oracle™ Financials reports on standard laser printers, whilst maintaining column formats and with auto-scaling.

Overview

Preview…

Removes the need to edit reports manually to fit the printer page
Eliminates editing errors - the output is exactly what the system produced
Uses mono-spaced fonts so columns stay vertical with no snaking
Outputs to PDF to save paper and keep reports secure
Automatically scales to fit standard paper sizes and uses standard printers - no 80/132 column printer is needed

Oracle™ Financials and eBusiness Suite reports are difficult to print on laser printers whilst retaining their desired format, with the output exceeding page margins or columns snaking vertically. To answer these fundamental usage issues and provide a number of useful enhancements to for reporting, Lanboss has created Lanboss Preview, a simple-to-use application that allows reports to be printed on standard laser printers, without the need manually reformat the report.

Preview enhances security, by ensuring that the output cannot be modified during formatting and is exactly as produced by the system. Orientation can be either portrait or landscape to make best use of the physical page and improve legibility. PDF output has been added to save paper and allow reports to be emailed or saved to file.

Highlights

Lanboss Preview technical highlights include:

Updated User Experience - with theme support and new streamlined User Interface to make the product even easier to use
Mono Spaced Fonts - Preview uses standard mono spaced fonts to ensure columns are straight and allows a laser printer to simulate a 80/132 column line printer
Automatic page scaling - Scales the text font size to match the printer page's width and height
Zoom - the page can be viewed at virtually any Zoom level. With 'Whole Page' selected, the image will dynamically fill the main Preview dialog
Printer Selection - Select and configure the printer to be used for printing to directly from the main dialog
Page Borders - to cater for printouts that need to be punched and put in files, for easy legibility
Document History - Quickly recall previous documents without running the reports again on the Oracle™ system.

Clients

Customer Testimonials

"We wanted our users to have flexible access to meaningful information, but we wanted to avoid the maintenance problems that thousands of printer queues would bring, so we had to find a solution. We found that solution thanks to the work of LANboss and the LB Preview package"

Dr. Brian Negus (Loughborough University)

“The reason Fujitsu selected the Lanboss Preview project was to remove the need for the management of print queues from the Oracle Application. Lanboss Preview is a standalone print preview program designed to view and print fixed format text reports.

In the solution, the primary task of Lanboss Preview will be to make the Oracle standard reports destined for a text printer display correctly on a user screen and match the intended page breaks. The Lanboss Preview process steps are summarised below:

Report output created on the same server as the Concurrent Manager;
Associate the request output file mime type with the Lanboss application;
Plugin for the user’s desktop Browser (for the users that will be printing standard Oracle report output ) – file association at launch point; and
Lanboss accesses the file via the browser”

Mr Kevin Madden (Business & Application Services - FUJITSU)

Screenshots

Lanboss Preview has a simple user interface that is modelled on the Microsoft Office look and feel. Please click the images for more detail:

Main Form

The Main Form shows the report as it will be printed out, i.e. a WYSIWYG view. The toolbar is user configurable, a user can remove items that they don’t frequently use. Options include the ability to change fonts, margins and much more.

Preview Main Menu

The File menu carries the essential functions to produce the desired output quickly. Many of the options are found on the main toolbar, so these can still be accessed from here if the user has removed them from the toolbar. The most important functionality is to print or to use the ability to Save to PDF, which stops wasting paper and creates a secure copy of the output!

Page Setup Dialog

The Page Setup option allows users to set up the paper size and margins they would like to use for the report. In turn these are used in the WYSIWYG display of the report. This allows users to make sure that paper punch holes avoid any of the figures printed on the report!

Technical

Technical Overview

What is it?

Lanboss Preview is an Internet browser or Windows (file) explorer associated application.

Oracle Financials™/eBusiness Suite™ reports are files produced by the Oracle system for download using a browser. The file extension Oracle™ Financials uses^* is associated within the workstation configuration so that whenever a user opens a file with that extension, Preview will be launched automatically and offers the ability to easily produce high quality printouts or PDFs.

^* This is part of the Oracle Financials implementation

Command Line Options

Lanboss Preview supports the following command line options:

lbPreview <FileName>

lbPreview /R=.rpt /S

Where:

<FileName> - the filename that Lanboss Preview should display

/S - Save settings to registry

/D - Load internal Default settings and ignore registry

/R=<Extension> - Register file extension associations (e.g. /R=.out) This associates lbPreview.exe with the specified file extension, plus files with no extension and disables the Internet Explorer 'Save As' dialogue for the specified association

/X - Remove file extension associations

How does it Work?

The primary function of Lanboss Preview is to make reports destined for a text printer display correctly on screen and match the intended page breaks. In order to do this Lanboss Preview has to scale the font size down until the page of the report fits on the page to be printed.

So how does it achieve all of this? It does the following:

Load the entire text file into memory
Analyse the output to find the maximum number of characters per line - Knowing the maximum number of characters per line determines whether to use portrait or landscape page layout. If the line length is over 85, it uses landscape, otherwise portrait
Scan the report to find the maximum number of lines on any one page, the font size is then decreased until the longest page fits on a single printed page
Once the lines fit the printer page, it then reduces the font size again so that the maximum line length will fit on the page, if required *The pages are then shown on the preview panel of the main dialog.

For any changes to the printer, font, margins etc, it re-calculates everything and re-displays the results in the preview panel

Forms

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