Visual Basic® 2010 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 34. Printing

Visual Basic .NET provides several good tools for printing. String formatting objects enable you to determine how text is wrapped and truncated if it won't fit in a printing area. Methods provided by Graphics objects enable you to easily scale, rotate, and translate drawing commands.

The basic process, however, seems somewhat backward to many programmers. Rather than issuing commands to a printer object, a program responds to requests to draw pages generated by a PrintDocument object. Instead of telling the printer what to do, the program responds to the PrintDocument object's requests for data.

In some cases, generating a printout using only Visual Basic commands can be difficult. The following section explains alternative methods for generating a printout and tells when you might want to use those methods. If you just want to print several pages of text, it's often easier to pull the text into Microsoft Word or some other application that specializes in formatting text rather than writing your own.

Another option used by many developers is to purchase a third-party printing application. Some of these tools help with certain kinds of printing such as report generation. Chapter 35, "Reporting," provides an introduction to Crystal Reports, a report generation and printing tool that is available with some versions of Visual Basic and that you can purchase separately.

In some cases, however, you cannot take an easy way out. If the program generates very complex images ...