Extra blank lines in Reports 2.0

We're using ORACLE Reports 2.0.14.8.0 and Toolkit for Motif 2.0.10.22.0 with version 7.1.4.1.0 of the Server.

I've seen some bizarre results with the Reports product, but the most inexplicable is also the one that our customer is complaining about.

Extra blank lines are inserted in the text output of a report, regardless of whether the output is to a (dot matrix) line printer or to an ASCII text file. The blank lines do *not* represent logical break units. They occur every two or three lines, with no apparent consistency in the number of single-spaced lines between the blanks. However, the blank lines do not appear in either Screen or Previewer output of the same report.

Oh, BTW, I should mention that this occurs whenever the report output is generated by r20runm (almost always through use of a RUN_PRODUCT command from a form) when the user prints via the Previewer's PRINT button. It does *not* happen when the same report (.rep) is executed by the text-mode r20run. But since you cannot tell RUN_PRODUCT which executable you want to use (a good selling point for future products is to fix this unfortunate oversight), RUN_PRODUCT will inexorably call the graphical executable to produce text output.

And, at least on our SGI IRIX/Motif platform, r20runm doesn't do a very good job of mapping graphical output to text. It almost appears that r20runm is "carding" the output rows, as if it has a biological compulsion  to vertically justify page output to the nominal page depth via some algorithm which cannot yield an integral number of lines per page.

My TAR on this problem is still open, never having been satisfactorily resolved by Oracle. The best they could tell me was to upgrade, since their new ASCII driver supposedly solves the above problem. However, due to contractual commitments, upgrading the customer may not be an option in the time frame during which this problem must be fixed.

My stopgap solution was to create an alert which asks the user whether to send output to a printer, file or previewer; if they select the printer or file, they get a Print Chooser form which enables them to select output to a file, a printer, or both. That execution is done by a HOST command which invokes a Unix shell script, which in turn passes runtime parameters along to r20run -- which then executes the report without the randomly-inserted blank lines which the customer (and everyone else) found so irksome. I also found it necessary to mandate a caution in our user documentation stating that use of the Previewer PRINT facility to produce text output is not recommended.

Has anyone encountered this, or a similar problem with the Motif-based Reports products? Do you know of a way to guarantee that all rows are single-spaced? (Yes, every text element has been manually selected for single spacing in the Designer -- it doesn't solve the problem, though.) Can this problem be solved without the use of a Unix shell script as a kludge?

Heartfelt thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions.

Karla Johnson

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Karla Johnson                       |      Internet: karjohn_at_kincyb.com
S/W Engr., Informax Data Systems    |                  or ab803_at_lafn.org
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