Since RPV is not a standard report maker, we understand that you don't understand.
To make it easy for you to understand, let's say that RPV is an interpreter of ASCII files or a text formatter program that works for Windows.

If you know how to create an ASCII file using your programming language then you know how to program an RPV report.

For example, let's say that your old DOS program sends a report to a printer; to do that you generate an ASCII file redirected to the printer. But, what happens when your application sends escape commands (Epson) to the printer and your customers changed their minds and bought another kind of printer that does not recognizes those "escape commands"?

What happens is that you worked to fit the report in the page changing font sizes, cutting pages, etc but now with these new printers your program doesn't work.

To solve this is RPV. Just redirect your report to a text file and let the server to take care of it. So if you have to modify your program again to RPV prints it properly, it will work for all the printers.

If you decide to produce more quality, you can do it too. RPV has a complete set of commands and settings that helps you to give the report the format that you want. We mean Windows format (Bitmaps, barcodes, colors, font effects, etc).

When you already know how to produce these kind of files, since they are ASCII files, you can generate them using any language.

Please note that RPV manual has few pages. This is specially NOT TO READ 700 PAGES to learn how to program a simple report!!

If we just said that RPV was an ASCII text formatter, we just have to generate an ASCII file. Any language will be good to do this task.

If you are going to work with an existing application, first thing you have to do is to change the destination of your reports to a file and not to the printer.

Second is to define what we want. If we want only to have an "any printer" compatible report, we only have to generate the file and name it with a TXT, LST or PRN extension. If we want instead, a good looking report, we have to modify the program to generate an RPV file.

Use our samples to see how to do it.

If you determined that you wanted an "any printer" compatible report, what you've got to do is to send the report to a text file and change its name to any name but with TXT, LST or PRN extension. You must place the file in the same directory that the server is searching (queue directory).

On the other hand, you must start RPV in server mode, and the queue must be opened.

See our examples to know how to use the server.

We think that RPV can do many things for you. Almost the same way that you use to migrate your programs from DOS.

Just define a queue directory for RPV: for example /tmp/RPVqueue is a good one.

After that send the files that you want to print to this directory with the extensions TXT, LST, PRN for text files or RPV/RPV for RPV files.

Start the RPV in server mode, searching the directory via FTP.

We would say it is better, but what is truth is that this tool is not the same kind of tools you usually see. This tool doesn't connect to any database by itself for example, but lets you to handle your report from your program, using the language that you want to use, even with old languages and old versions. In fact first time RPV was used as a DOS reporter was for a program developed using RM-Cobol 85 and it was great.

The reason is that the fonts and sizes were not declared in the RPV file. To solve this, in the [header] section declare the fonts with a line like this: {f=arial;s=10} (font equals arial, size equals 10).

Here are two possibilities:

1. The queue is closed. Just open the server console (by clicking on the small icon on the taskbar) and open the queue.

2. Even when the report is released (released means "RPV" extension instead of "RP" for example), the file can be taken by another program (probably your program has it taken). Just close the file in your program to be readable by the server.

This problem can be caused by three things:

1. There is an AUTOEXEC.CMD or another CMD file that is protected to be deleted in the queue directory that contains a SHUTDOWN command. Remove SHUTDOWN from the CMD file and try again.

This is because you have another server running or you have the viewer active. Only one server is able to run at the same time. To solve this, just close the server that you have running or close the viewer window.

This is because the server is trying to inspect a directory that doesn't exist. To solve this you will have to determine if the specified directory was wrong for RPV or if the directory must be created.

This happens because you set the paperlenght variable but not paperwidth. If you define one, you must define the other one. If not, the other value will be zero and you won't see the report.

This is a printer problem. We observed that there are some printers that have that behavior. There is no specific printer that have this problem. Try by upgrading the printer driver. We had good results installing the driver provided by the printer manufacturer (not Windows one).

Even when it is possible to generate the same form with RPV or RPD, we recommend to use RPD for this.
Using RPD will become easier to change the form in the future. Also it will be much easier to program and more readable.

RPV can't read those files which there is at least one line containing more than 500 chars. If you see this error, just split the line or "trim" it to cut spaces. This problem is only for the viewer. RPV print server or RPVReport.ocx are able to print these kind of reports.

Please remember that RPV needs you to specify a carriage return by using {\n}. If you don't use it, everything will be printed in the same line.

Umfortunally we can't solve this problem since Spool32 is part of the operating system and it is required to print. This program can fail at any moment and RPV does not do anything special to make it fail. In fact, you could experience problems with this program on computers that do not have RPV installed.
What we suggest to solve this problem is to reinstall Windows. It is possible that that problem (and many others) will be solved doing that.

Use the setting OPEN & CLOSE to solve this situation. By specifying these you'll be able to use brackets freely.

Please remember that you must have all the rights over the queue directory. This happens because the server finds a report and prints it, and when it wants to remove it, it can't and it finds it again, time after time.

Many times happens that even when you declared the correct paper size, the report is sent to the printer and the pages are cut wrongly. You can solve this problem in two ways: adjust the printer margins from the printer configuration or modify the MAXY value for your report (recommended).

If you are working with text files instead of RPV, just define your own kind of paper and specify a smaller paper to force RPV to cut the pages before.

RPVReport.ocx installs automatically in the same directory that RPV.exe is. RPVReport.ocx needs RPV.exe and other files, so if you move the OCX to another directory, then it will not be able to find the needed files.

To solve this problem just call RPVReport.ocx from the RPV directory.