Thursday, September 13, 2012

Proper Fonts for dot-matrix printers


I have been wrestling with finding a proper font for quite a while now for my dot-matrix printing needs utilizing a POS printer which I decided to use for our Trip Ticket and Fuel Voucher issuances.  The usage of a POS printer appeals to me because it saves money, paper, ink and time because there is never a need to cut a paper into several portions anymore, but the fonts I used to print those do not appeal to me.

Here is the output using Tahoma:



While the output is clear, simply looking at the colons you can immediately notice the alignment is not proper, and that is because Tahoma is a graphical font.  Not to mention that it prints slower because it has more DPIs (Dots Per Inch) than the DOS fonts.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

ssExcelPivot Enhancements

ssExcelPivot class  is among my underrated or maybe I can say the most underrated class of _ssClasses library.  But this is in fact one of the best and useful class I have created so far.  After I created this class, creating top managerial reports has never been soooo easy for me.  What does this class do?

ssExcelPivot class  is that simple small insignificant looking button as shown below (ssButton4) that can create instant pivot reports in excel with ease.  Its power lies with creating these reports with just a few switch, which is what you cannot do with any crosstab utilities or even when designing reports via .frx way.  Shown is the sample form given to subscribers, data coming from VFP Samples directory:



It creates 12 sample pivot reports in Excel (in my sample) just to show how things can be easily done.  However, you can create more than that, even hundreds of different format, styles, etc.  At the very bottom is Create Your Own Report which allows user the ability to create a pivot report in excel of their own choosing.

I said it is easy to use this.  So I will show below codes inside the sample form I give to subscribers.  First of all, create a cursor to serve as its recordsource:

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Capture Portion of Image from Webcam


Are you interested in having something like a small application that captures an image from a webcam?  Just like when we get our driver's license where we simply stand on one side  then the operator says "hold still..." then later gives a thumbs up sign?  When the driver's license card is presented to us, we see that our face is snapped and cropped so it fits properly on said license.

Is this hard to do with VFP?  Not if you know where to look for tools already shared to us by others.