Windows Metafile Engine

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Guest

Hi I have a strange problem with a solution that I don't want to use ;)
and wonder if there is an alternate solution.

Problem is this, I have installed a PDF printer (aloaha pdf-suite,
www.aloaha.com)
on several machines. the app itself works as expected. BUT

It uses the Windows Metafile engine to create a pdf document from any app.

But on some machines (all with Win XP SP2) the app only prints pictures and
no text, The Support for PDF-Suite claims that this is a problem with the Win
Metafile engine. The only solution is to reinstall the machine from scratch,
however as it is quite a few computers and quite a complex setup I was hoping
that you could reinstall only the Win Metafile engine, without having to
format and reinstall the whole enchilada. (the app works on some machines
with winXP SP2 but not on others)

Is it possible to reinstall just the Windows metafile engine?

I am willing to try anything, such as regedit hacking to avoid having to
format/reistall.

Any Suggestions?
 
I have never heard of a seperate metafile engine.
I don't know why (normaly the application can decide),
but it seems that spool-files (in emf-format) sometimes contains textoutput
commands which reference glyph indices and not characters itself.
Perhaps aloha uses the spool-files to build pdf-files from and has problems
with calculating the corrosponding character codes from glyph indices.
You can download splviewer from my home-page
(german http://www.lvbprint.de/bin/current/SplViewSetup.exe) or
emfviewer from http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/EMFSpoolViewer.asp
to view the printed spl-file (you have to stop the printer and keep the
spool-files after
printing). I suppose you can see in all cases the correct printing output.
To examing the content you can send a correct and invalid file to me and
I will look at them.

Dieter (d i e t e r . r i e k e r t @ l v b p r i n t . d e)
 
We could locate the problem. It were not the glyph indices, but the flag
"ETO_IGNORELANGUAGE" in "fuOptions" EMRTEXT-Record, which can be set by a
application in ExtTextOut-Api Call.
Some printer-drivers seems to ignore text-output, when this flag is set.
Unfortunatly
there is very few informationen available.
"Windows NT 4.0 and later: Reserved for system use. If an application sets
this flag, it loses international scripting support and in some cases it may
display no text at all. "
(We could test it by stopping printer and patching the flag out in the
spl-file, and then continuing printing (0x1004->0x0004))
Perhaps someone knows, if there is a possibibilty in windows to influence
the creating of that flag.
I don't think, that the application has set it in this case.

Dieter
 
Macrules said:
Hi I have a strange problem with a solution that I don't want to use ;)
and wonder if there is an alternate solution.

Problem is this, I have installed a PDF printer (aloaha pdf-suite,
www.aloaha.com)
on several machines. the app itself works as expected. BUT

It uses the Windows Metafile engine to create a pdf document from any app.

But on some machines (all with Win XP SP2) the app only prints pictures and
no text, The Support for PDF-Suite claims that this is a problem with the Win
Metafile engine. The only solution is to reinstall the machine from scratch,
however as it is quite a few computers and quite a complex setup I was hoping
that you could reinstall only the Win Metafile engine, without having to
format and reinstall the whole enchilada. (the app works on some machines
with winXP SP2 but not on others)

Is it possible to reinstall just the Windows metafile engine?

I am willing to try anything, such as regedit hacking to avoid having to
format/reistall.

Any Suggestions?

How reinstall the windows matafile?
Click to expand...
 
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