Courier Font Size in Report Generation Toolkit

[Omar Mussa]

I'm trying to print a "Standard" text report using the Report Generation Toolkit - for some reason if I set the font type to 'Courier' (using "Set Report Font.vi") and print the report, it always prints at the same size (10 I think) no matter what I actually enter as a font size (trying to use a smaller size --> 8). However, if I set the font to 'Courier New' I can set the font size to 8 and it seems to work (the printout is smaller). I'm using LV2009 SP1. Anyone else see this before? Is it a LabVIEW bug in the Report Generation Toolkit (RGT)? Is it a printer driver bug on my machine?

Also, the 'Font Output' always returns the default data - which makes it useless to me right now - I was hoping to see it update the font name/size to ensure that the data was set correctly. Another RGT bug?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I'm trying to print a "Standard" text report using the Report Generation Toolkit - for some reason if I set the font type to 'Courier' (using "Set Report Font.vi") and print the report, it always prints at the same size (10 I think) no matter what I actually enter as a font size (trying to use a smaller size --> 8). However, if I set the font to 'Courier New' I can set the font size to 8 and it seems to work (the printout is smaller). I'm using LV2009 SP1. Anyone else see this before? Is it a LabVIEW bug in the Report Generation Toolkit (RGT)? Is it a printer driver bug on my machine?

Also, the 'Font Output' always returns the default data - which makes it useless to me right now - I was hoping to see it update the font name/size to ensure that the data was set correctly. Another RGT bug?

Font is not equal to font. You have so called bitmap fonts and true type fonts. Bitmapped fonts can only be displayed in the sizes that the font file contains specific bitmaps for. Maybe that Windows 7 in the user interface supports resampling them nowadays, not really sure about that, but the result is always suboptimal, with artefacts such as blurry edges. However most printers still don't know how to resize bitmap fonts, and I would be surprised if the Report Generation Toolkit even attempts to support that. Courier New is a true type font and those are defined in vectorized form and can therefore much more easily be resized, and Windows supported resizing them basically from the start when they introduced that feature in a similar way than Apple had decided to do already earlier. True Type fonts are really developed in cooperation with Apple and Adobe, and Microsoft took them over with some help of Adobe, not without making some minor modifications to the meaning of some of the parameters in the font file, so that a one to one copy wasn't possible.