Newsletter 10: Paper Orientation Issue with SAP Applications

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Dany
Amyuni Team
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Joined: Wed Sep 11 2002
Location: Montreal.
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Newsletter 10: Paper Orientation Issue with SAP Applications

Post by Dany »

Using SAP based applications, users cannot change the paper orientation from Portrait to Landscape when printing multiple copies of a document

Technical Background
To set the paper orientation, an application changes the printer settings using what is called a device mode or DEVMODE structure. Two items need to be set in order to change orientation:
1 - The dmFields flag should be modified in order to set the DM_ORIENTATION flag to 1
2 - The dmOrientation parameter should be set to either DMORIENT_PORTRAIT or DMORIENT_LANDSCAPE depending on the requested page orientation.

Under some situations, mainly when printing duplicate copies, SAP does not set the dmFields flag as in point 1, but only sets the dmOrientation flag as in point 2.

The Microsoft specifications indicate that the printer driver should ignore the dmOrientation in this case, which the Amyuni printer driver does as well as the Microsoft printer drivers.

The fix we did is to force the orientation even if the dmFields flag is not set properly, which is not really recommended but should not have side effects on other well behaving applications. This fix is available in the 3.0.2 printer driver which will be posted shortly on Windows Updates.

Special thanks to the team from Moen Inc. who gave us the opprotunity to debug this issue on their systems.
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