Accounting reports work best with monospaced fonts due to the need to make sure
all columns of data line up as they should. There are typically hundreds of
fonts available on Windows PC's. Most of these are proportional fonts where the
horizontal space used by a character varies. About the only monospaced font
that you can always count on being available is Courier. Some users like the
Courier font but others prefer a different font.
ICommander Enhanced Printing to laser printers lets you choose from 14 different monospaced fonts. Eleven of these are free and three may be purchased from Fontcraft. Since many of the free fonts supported will likely not be on your Windows PC, ICommander installs them for you when ICommander Accounting Software is installed on your server. ICommander developers tested many free and for purchase fonts when Enhanced Printing was implemented. The eleven free fonts from which you may choose offer significant variations in how text appears on your graphical reports. ICommander Standard Help Topics Menu has examples of each of the fonts currently supported but trying different ones on actual ICommander reports is the best way to determine which one you prefer as your default.
If you have a monospaced font on your PC that is not among the fourteen presently supported by ICommander, please let us know so we can add it to those available for Enhanced Printing.
ICommander Standard Help Topics Menu also has an "Enhanced Printing Examples" choice that has examples of reports using various of the fonts available (plus examples of using color text and/or backgrounds). This includes a list of a number of websites that offer monospaced fonts. If you wish to explore some of these for other fonts you would like us to implement, please do so.
ICommander uses the Print Wizard software from Rasmussen Software, Inc. for its graphical printing. This is the same company that supplies the Anziowin Terminal Emulation and Communications software that ICommander requires on each workstation accessing ICommander on a Redhat Linux Server. ICommander offers many features that are driven by the capabilities of the Print Wizard and Anziowin software. When there are multiple shared printers on a Local Area Network (LAN), installing the Print Wizard Server software on a Windows PC or Server available to all LAN users is the most efficient.
The Anziowin Terminal Emulation and Communications software also has the Print Wizard software built into it. ICommander supports Pass-Through printing via Anziowin in addition to using the Print Wizard Server software. If most users print to a local printer instead of central shared printers, using the Pass-Through printing is a less expensive alterative. NOTE however, that you will need to install the ICommander monospaced fonts on each PC using the Pass-Through printing in order to use those not already on the Windows PC. This is a simple matter but an easy step to miss.
Installing all the ICommander fonts on each user PC is also useful for making them available as the screen fonts in Anziowin. There are typically hundreds of fonts installed on a Windows PC but locating the ones that are monospaced vs proportional can be challenging. The range of fonts supported by ICommander Enhanced Printing offer substantially different appearance of your ICommander screens as well. A number of users will use one of the fonts that always puts a slash through the zero character to help distinguish it from the letter O for the screen font but may use a different one as the default for printing reports.
If you have remote users who use ICommander on your Linux Server via an encrypted tunnel through the Internet via Anziowin, the remote site will need to either install Print Wizard Server or use the Anziowin built-in Print Wizard via Pass-Through Printing. As with the LAN, use of the additional fonts supported by ICommander will require installing them on each PC using Pass-Through Printing and/or on the PC or Server running Print Wizard Server.
Note that Pass-Through Printing uses the same encrypted tunnel as Anziowin uses
for your screen entries. If you are concerned about sending accounting reports
over your Internet connection unencrypted or are subject to HIPAA and required
to use encryption, the Pass-Through Printing accomplishes that for you. There
are other ways to accomplish the encryption but this is the simplest.