Expert: Srini Nagarajan - 6/25/2005

Question
Hi,

I develop a school application that puts out some printouts e.g. school students list, class time tables for the purpouse of being printed on paper
, but I find a lot of difficulity in:
1 - setting the desgin of the printout on the screen. e.g. when printing a students list such that the names of students per class under each year group are listed in the form of a 2 columns table with many rows as many as classes, each column will hold the names of the students of one class, thus each row holds info of two classes
......> It takes a lot lot of work just to adjust the desgin but finally at the very end, one may get the desgin correctly on the screen.
2 - The second problem is that when the list is printed on paper, I do not have any control on the breaks of the pages for example, names of SOME students in one class may be printed at the end of the second page and the rest of the names will be printed in the third page, while this should not happen, it should goes that all of the names are printed in one page only such that if there is no space on the current page, thus I should start printing on new page, i.e. make a break to a new page.

I tried to look for crystal reports just for the printing issue but I found its license is too expensive and at the same time I do not know whether it will solve my problem or not.

N.B: I currently use classic asp but nearly i will use asp.net

Is there any solution to solve this wiered problem in both asp and asp.net?

Thanks alot for your help
Rasha Zaki  

Answer
Hi

Why don't you try to use PDF generation application?  In HTML you can't control the page width and height and paginations...

You can use Crystal Reports or Active PDF, If you feel crystal report is expensive if you use for Schools their license rates will differs.. try Crystal reports or try PDF

Happy programming!

-srini