Janine Dueck of Instrument Meter Specialties (IMS) contacted the xTuple Help Desk recently with a report of an intermittent printing problem. The company, which is based in Lancaster, CA, sells a broad range of test instruments, panel meters, and components. At first, Janine said, the problem cropped up when they were printing packing slips. Gradually they found other reports with printing problems, too.
In working together with the xTuple Help Desk, we were able to determine the issue wasn't isolated to xTuple's software. Janine and others at IMS were also experiencing difficulty printing from other programs, including the open source office productivity suite LibreOffice. Also interesting was that not all company computers had the printing problem. While most were running Windows 10, the one running Ubuntu could print just fine.
This led us to believe that printer drivers were to blame — and that if those were updated, the problem would go away. But updating the drivers didn't seem to fix it. Jason Dueck, who handles technology for IMS, was tempted to throw out Windows 10 and install Ubuntu everywhere instead. Before he did that, though, they did a little more troubleshooting.
In the end, Jason and Janine traced the problem to a Windows 10 configuration settting. They were happy to share the solution they found, in case that might help anyone else in the community who runs into this problem.
Here's what they wrote:
"There is a setting that allows Windows to 'manage' your default printer and dynamically changes the default printer to the last printer used, temporarily overriding the 'Default Printer'. Consequently, when the last printer was our Dymo Label printer, it saw the page size as that of an address label making the Packing Slip (or other report) try to fit that printer. We saw a similar problem in LibreOffice 4.3 before upgrading to 5.0 version. The suite indicated that there was no default printer and could not determine the page size. Upgrading to version 5.0 fixed the problem. To disable this troublesome 'feature' in Windows 10, go to Start > Settings > Devices and scroll down until you see the setting, 'Let Windows manage my default printer'. Change to 'Off' and close the window. Printing should work properly now."
Thanks to the Duecks for this feedback!
Pierce Tyler
Pierce is a founding member of xTuple and, for the first 18 years of the company's life (from 2001 to 2019), was responsible for the day-to-day technical support of xTuple’s global community of customers and implementation partners. In addition to his support role, Pierce managed the services group, whose scope includes implementations and ongoing professional services. He was previously a manager for knowledge management at Great Bridge, a commercial open source company serving the PostgreSQL community. For many years he taught digital literacy and college English at Old Dominion University and the University of Maryland.
Specialties: Product Support, Quality Assurance, Documentation