DCMS Program Troubleshooting Answers                         Back

Q.     My printer prints everything fine, except for mailing labels.

I believe you were probably trying to print labels and you saw the message "No print destination specified"  This is because the DCMS for Windows was written with a programming environment that dates back to Windows 95 and it has a "report generator" that was state of the art back then. The Report generator made it simple to create labels and I incorporated that capability into the DCMS. 

Since Windows 95, both the Windows printer controller and Printers on the market have changed. I am updating the DCMS to update the compiler because of things like the label generator incompatibility. However, when I started to re-write the program (you will see it later this year as DCMS Pro, Release 11.0) I decided not to use the follow-on report generator to create labels, but rather to write them from scratch (like every other report in the DCMS). This would accomplish several things:

  • a.   it will lessen the chance that the new labels will become out-dated and overtaken by a new Windows print controller and/or Printer generation; 
  • b.   give my users more control over the look and positioning of the labels on their sheets; and
  • c.   give me more control to add new features as my users ask for them.
As a result, I have come up with "Plain Labels" for the DCMS Pro. I don't really like the term, because they could eventually look more fancy than the ones in the Label Maker now. I have retro-fitted plain labels into the DCMS and if you check the Label Maker, you will see Plain Labels as an option on the menu in the right-top corner of the screen. If you choose the Plain Label option, the DCMS will print your labels on standard 30 to a sheet pages (the only option at present, I regret) in Arial 12 point print, which is the Post Office's preferred type face for machine reading your mail as it is sorted.

Also included is a "Configure Plain Labels" button which allows you to control where the labels fall on the page. It allows you to move the label printing left or right to align the columns, and to move individual label rows up or down to better fit the sheet as your printer prints them. Every printer is different and Plain Labels allows you to fine tune the "label report" to better suit your printer.

It will also rid you of the "No print destination specified" error message, since that message is a factor of the Win95-era "report generator" trying to operate in the WinXP world.

Hope that helps. 
 
 

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