I have a situation where there are blank pages printing out. My Data is Channel Skip and there is sometimes (not always) an extra "1" at the beginning and end of the data and sometimes in the middle of the flow. This is of course in the first column of the data.

Beginning:

1
1
-

-
- REMIT TO:


This of course causes a blank page to print with the invoice (remit to:) on the second page. I have "Skip blank data pages" checked on the compilation options but it seems to have no affect in this case.

I know there is a function isdatapageempty but I cannot seem to find a way to use this.

Any pointers?

Hi,

Let's try the Lazy solution first

If you never want to skip a page when 1 is encountered in 1st column, you can specify that in the Emulation:

1. Double click on the sample data pane
2. Change the character indicating to 'Skip Page'. The default value is '1', but you could change it for a character that is never encountered in the 1st column of any line.

So the question becomes:

What happens when you ignore the Skip Page command in the emulation? Is the data stable anyway?

If you cannot simply ignore the skip page command, then we will have to consider another option.

Hope this helps!

Benoit

Although I am a firm adherent to the KISS principle I cannot change the skip page character. The data will not be stable in doing this and I will have no easy way to determine the page breaks in the data. I have to go the more difficult route....

An User-Defined emulation could be the solution.

As I understand, the simple fact that '1' is at the beginning of a line is not enough do indicate that a page must be skipped. So, what exactly tells you that a page must be skipped?

E.g.
Skip the page if:

- The maximum number of lines per page is reached

OR

- Two consecutive lines beginning with '1' are encountered

OR

- A line beginning with '1' is encountered but the previous and next line do not begin with '1'

Hope this helps!

Benoit

Let's KISS

Reference here:
http://www.objectiflune.com/Documentatio...y-function.html


To use the ispageempty function (not isdatapageempty), you must not write the parenthesis (i.e. use ispageempty instead of ispageempty()). This is somewhat unintuitive, so I will try to have its syntax changed if possible in order to accept calls such as ispageempty().

You could therefore forget about my last post and follow your first approach, using the following condition on your pages in order to make them execute only for non-empty datapages:

Hope this helps!

ben

That is exactly what I was trying before I posted but I did not know to take the parenthesis out! I thought the parenthesis were looking for parameters and I could not figure out the parameters that it was looking for.

Well - without the parenthesis it does work in a condition. However, now I know why the "skip blank data pages" is not working in the compilation options.

It appears that even though the emulation is set to Channel Skip it is treating the first column as data and not as a control column. So on the blank pages it sees the "1" as data and the condition =not(ispageempty) never turns false.

I can somewhat work around this by defining 2 global variables:

&data as a string with no default variable
&dw as a measure with a default value of 0

Then a condition called RemitMissing which has Press talk before set to:

set(&data,@(12,13,17))
set(&dw, stringwidth(&data))

and the advanced condition set to:

=gt(&dw, 0 )

Not very elegant but it can then be used to skip any page that does not have the "Remit" in the proper place.

This would be prone to error if there was a movement in the data or if the program producing the data had a glitch. I would be more comfortable if I could do something that looked at the whole region of the page minus the first column (or the first line since the "1" is always in column 1 row 1).