Windows Forms 2.0 Programming

8. Printing Drawing to the screen is usually easy because screen settings are generally constant during the run of the application. Drawing to a printer, on the other hand, is more complicated because users may change the printer or the prin...

Print Documents The basic unit of printing in Windows Forms is the print document. A print document describes the characteristics of what's to be printed, such as the document title, and provides events at various parts of the printing process, su...

Print Controllers The name of the print document also shows up in the dialog displayed by the print document during printing. The Printing dialog lets the user cancel the print job as it's being spooled to the printer, as shown in Figure 8.1. ...

Basic Print Events All print controller implementations rely on the print document's print events to gather the drawing commands into the Graphics object, either to spool to the printer or to show on the screen: void printDocument_PrintPage(obj...

Margins The PageBounds rectangle property of the PrintPageEventArgs class represents the entire rectangle of the page, all the way to the edge. The MarginBounds rectangle represents the area inside the margins. Figure 8.8 shows the dif...

Page Settings You may have noticed that both the MarginBounds and the PageSettings properties of the PrintPageEventArgs class are read-only. Changing PageSettings (including the margins) on-the-fly requires handling the print document's QueryPageS...

Printer Settings So far, all the printing in this chapter has been done to the default printer, as defined by Windows. The user can change the printer for a document via the printer button on the PageSetupDialog. It's more common, however, to allo...

Useful Printing Techniques Our tour of the printing landscape has so far negotiated the spectrum of fundamental concepts, types, and techniques you typically need when you start building a printing solution. Now, we build on these to create useful...

Where Are We? The nucleus around which the entire .NET printing architecture revolves is the print document. It's the one that initiates the printing process, fires the print events (through the use of a print controller), holds the page and print...