Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

Printing

Most of the programs described in earlier chapters display output on the computer’s screen.

Chapters 29 and 30 explain how to save output in files.

This chapter explains a third method for saving output: printing. Using these techniques, you

can print text, shapes, images — just about anything you want.

Before you start a printing project, however, be warned that printing in C# isn’t

trivial. It’s easy enough to display some text or a few lines in a printout, but

producing a complex formatted document can be a lot of work.

If you need to produce a nicely formatted resume, graph, or grid of values, you

should ask yourself whether there’s an easier way. For example, Microsoft Word

is great at producing nicely formatted text documents, and Microsoft Excel

does a wonderful job of making charts and graphs. You can certainly generate

these sorts of printouts using C#, but it may be a lot faster if you use another

tool such as Word or Excel.

Note that this isn’t the only way to print with C# code. For example, a C# pro-

gram that uses Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) can build WPF docu-

ments for later printing, or it can use the WPF printing techniques described in

Lesson 41. A program can also use a reporting tool such as Crystal Reports.

BASIC PRINTING

The PrintDocument component sits at the center of the printing process. To print, a program

creates an instance of this class ...