SSRS 2005 How to Print 4" X 3" label as Portrait.. SSRS assumes Landscape

Question

I have a SSRS 2005 report form that is printing to a Zebra ZDesigner TLP 2844-Z label printer. The Interactive and Page sizes are set to 4" wide by 3" high. Since there is no paper orientation in SSRS, it is assuming this to be a landscape report when it should be a portrait thereby printing the labels sideways.

The users are able to export to a PDF and print after adjusting the print settings, but the extra clicks to produce/print the pdf's are unacceptable.

Is there a way to force the print job to print portrait or another workaround/trick to do this?

Answer 1

Can you just set your Page width to be 3" and your height to 4" ? (Not your Interactive Size, your Page Size)

Answer 2

How are you designing the report? There should be a property to modify for paper orientation in the report's properties...

From MSDN

So what defines a portrait vs. landscape report? If the PageHeight is less than the PageWidth, then it is landscape, otherwise it is portrait. It is important to understand that Reporting Services has no notion of the rotation of the paper in the printer. It is up to the applications that consume the output (Acrobat reader, print control) to determine the correct printer settings to best render the specified page size.

Note that the DeviceInfo settings can be used at report rendering time to override the page sizes in the definition. This is how the client print control works when you change margins or page size. In SP2 and SQL 2005 Reporting Services, the default page sizes are extracted from the definition at publish time and written to the ReportServer database as custom properties on the report. While you can programmatically change these via the SetProperties method on the web service, they will be overwritten if the report is republished (unlike parameter and datasource information).

Answer 3

I have a similar printer with a similar problem. Change the report orientation to portrait (the numbers will be backward). Then when you run the report click page setup. Change the size from "USER" to either "custom" or "template" (depending upon your printer). You should then be able to use your printer properties to change the size of the labels.

Answer 4

To prevent the SSRS WinForms ReportViewer from rotating your printed labels, use a square page. If the length and width are the same, ReportViewer will not rotate. I found that when I expanded the page size for my 2.5" x 1" label to 2.5" x 2.5", the print was oriented correctly on the stock and there was no waste. Perhaps Zebra's driver clips the blank area.

I also tried designing a rotated label using Text Box's WritingMode = Rotate270. That didn't help.