Rave Reports Visual Designer

Waste Fit

Most printers have a Region on the paper that is called the waste area. What this represents is the portion of the Page where no printing can be done because of restrictions of the actual printing hardware (usually because the printer uses that region of the page to "grab" a hold of the paper when it is feeding it through the rollers). These values may range from 0 (common for dot-matrix printers) to 1.5 inches.  Ink jet printers typically have large bottom margins (and sometimes a 0 top margin), while most ink jet and laser printers have about a 0.25 inch left and right waste area.

The red-dotted lines that run on the border of the Page represent the waste-area of the currently selected printer (or specific values if the preferences are set that way). Anything in between the red line and the edge of the Page is the actual waste-area of the printer and you should avoid placing any components within that area. The problem is how to know what the actual waste area of the destination printer will be. If the Report is designed with extremely large margins that will be inside the waste area of all printers, then a lot of unnecessary blank space will be on each Page. The WasteFit property is Rave's answer to this common reporting problem.

The Page has a property called WasteFit, which can be either true or false. By default the value is False. Setting the property to true will make the Page adjust the components it contains so that they fit within the waste-area of the destination printer. The components contained will be resized so that they all fit in and adjust accordingly.

However, it is not sufficient with setting the WasteFit property to True for all this to happen automatically. Child components should have their anchor property set accordingly so that they too can adjust accordingly to the changes of the Page. When used properly, this property is a very powerful feature that allows the reports developed to automatically adapt to different destination printers.

See Also:

Anchor Editor, Anchor property, Waste Fit property