Will not print to Adobe PDF printer

[ajryounger]

Fund Manager Pro 2018 will not print reports correctly to the registered Adobe PDF printer (Adobe Acrobat Pro) on Win 10 Edu 64 bit. If "resize to 1 page" is off you get a preview which is, of course, far wider than the page. If it is on, you encounter a very outdated error message shown in the attached file. Strangely, you do get an apparently correct preview from the inferior "Microsoft print to pdf" driver. The "install pdf printer" button on the Fund Manager print dialog forces the user to the web page of a 3rd party driver (http://www.primopdf.com/). But that should be unnecessary when an authentic Adobe driver is present and registered. Under certain circumstances, Fund Manager also claims that it does not have enough memory for the print job which is nonsense since the machine is running 24G of RAM. And yes, every other piece of software prints just fine to the Adobe printer. Fund Manager, incidentally, will show a perfectly acceptable preview through the Adobe Postscript driver. Even more curiously, although the quality is poor, a graph window prints to the Adobe printer as well.
A little further exploration yields the following:
1. although it is very slow, a Portfolio Value report will print correctly to the Adobe driver.
2. the report that repeatedly fails is the Transaction Report
The problem seems to be related to the number and width of the columns. If I drop one and slightly resize others to be a bit narrower, it does try to print to the Adobe driver. It still fails though with an "insufficient memory" message. Once you get that error, fundamentally a hard "end task" shutdown is required.
Obviously, there are workarounds, but it is a shame that in an otherwise feature-rich tool the printing interface would be inadequate.
ay

[Mark]

Hi ajryounger,

Sorry about the troubles. Fund Manager is a 32 bit application. The Personal and Professional versions are limited to accessing 2GB of memory. The Advisor version can access 4GB. Even though your system has more than this amount of memory, Fund Manager is only capable of accessing these amounts, thus the reason for the out of memory error messages. Your printed page size is large enough that it is going over the 2GB limit. (We will clean up these error messages, to be more current.)

The amount of memory needed depends on the page size and resolution you are printing to. Your Adobe Acrobat Pro may have a higher resolution than the other PDF drivers that are working. Here are some ideas to try to improve this:

1) Try downloading the Advisor version, and just test it out. You can switch back to the Pro version after testing it. The Advisor version will hopefully work better, as your image size is right near the 2GB boundary.

2) Try lowering the resolution of your printer. In the "Print" dialog, press "Properties..." next to the printer. The resulting properties dialog varies by selected printer, but hopefully you can find an option to lower the resolution. For example, in PrimoPDF's properties, if you click on "Layout / Advanced..." you can adjust the "Print Quality" to another resolution. It defaults to 600dpi. Maybe yours is even higher, so you can try lowering it.

[ajryounger]

Mark,

Thanks for the information! I'm not sure whether I overlooked that somewhere in the documentation, or whether it's a "learn by doing" thing. The PrimoPDF does work, at least at medium resolutions (300dpi although not 600 as you say), although it's still not obvious why the native Adobe printer doesn't.

On the one hand, problem solved, or as solved as it can be for now I guess. On the other, I'm kind of curious. I have been away from the software business for about 10 years, so I am not up to date on printer driver implementations. But none of the innumerable software applications, 32 and 64 bit, running on my machines under a couple of different editions of Win 10, has any problem printing to Acrobat Pro. Indeed that is my default printer. Output quality is much higher too.

I don't recall what FM is written in and I appreciate the complexity of the code base. But it strikes me that the printer library code may be quite old. For personal use, report output is acceptable but I don't really print much except at month end for record keeping. I have only test printed one graph. For reporting to clients, however, I would want to produce higher resolution output.

Apart from updating the printer library, I'm not sure what the easiest route would be. A makeshift approach would be an "export reports to RTF" (markdown would be better actually) and "export chart data to CSV". Then I would just write my own processing code.

My note-taking software comes from a one man shop. It exports to 8 non-native formats (including html, rtf, markdown and latex). That might be an option.

thanks for the prompt feedback!
ay

[Mark]

Hi ay,

This limitation isn't documented, other than through that outdated error message. It hasn't been a common issue. I suspect your Adobe printer is a higher resolution, causing it to go over the 2GB boundary. This limitation only applies for print preview and printing with the scale down to 1 page wide option. In these cases, FM is using a technique where it allocates a large image, draws to that image, and then has Windows scale it down for output. Your other programs are likely not using this same approach, as they may not need to scale down to 1 page wide. The limitation is based on the total size of the allocated image, which depends on the printed page size and resolution, so if you reduce either of those, it will help. You could also turn off the "scale down to 1 page wide" option, and just reduce your report font and column widths, so it fits without having to use this option.

You can export graph data to a CSV file. From within a graph window see "File / Export / Other / Graph Data Points...". Report data is also available for export to CSV using "File / Export to CSV...".

I'm curious if you had a chance to try the Advisor version, and see if that worked any better? It should allow addressing up to 4GB of memory space, so I would assume it would give better results when printing to these larger page sizes.