April, 2008

WPF Printing - use the printing page

From a previous post of mine, you can see how to easily increase the size of a WPF element in order to print it.
That’s not much use though as you are still only hard coding the sizing.
What would be better is to use the height and width of the paper that has been selected.

Lo and behold, thats easy to do, using the PrintDialog class itself.
One further wrinkle is that you need to make sure that the actual element is resized, and you do that by telling it to resize itself.

Say you have an instance of PrintDialog called prtDlg:

Size pageSize = new Size(prtDlg.PrintableAreaWidth -30, prtDlg.PrintableAreaHeight - 30);
grd.Measure(pageSize);
grd.Arrange(new Rect(15, 15, pageSize.Width, pageSize.Height));

prtDlg.PrintVisual(grd, “My grid”);

Where grd is a Grid control containing a number of other elements

WPF Printing - why is it small

When you get to printing in WPF, you will find it so much easier than printing in previous Microsoft UI design (ie Winforms and MFC). See a previous post of mine to see how easy.

One thing that does occur though, is that when you print your element/canvas/grid/whatever, it will usually go on the printer very small. Why is that?
Actually, I think it is a good thing
What it means is that it’s printing exactly the same on the printer as on the screen, something we have been begging for, for ages [well since we’ve had GUI’s anyway].

So how can you make it bigger, well it’s pretty easy when you know how:

You simply make the element bigger by using a Transform before printing, like

grid.LayoutTransform = new ScaleTransform(6,6);
printDlg.PrintVisual(grid, “My vision”);

WPF Printing using PrintVisual

To do a simple print in WPF, you can do the following:

PrintDialog prtDlg = new PrintDialog();
if(prtDlg.ShowDialog() == true)
{
prtDlg.PrintVisual(element, “A simple drawing”);
}

This will throw up the XP or Vista print dialog, and then print the element specified, no problems at all.
Actually there are a couple of problems:

1. The element is always lined up in the top left of the printed page
2. If you haven’t specified any margin, the element might get cut off
3. There’s no pagination
4. It uses the same device independent system for printing as showing on the screen ,1:96, so an element 96 pixels wide will appear 1 inch wide on the printed paper

Printing with WPF

How does printing work with WPF?

Well, actually, if anyone out there has ever worked with printing in MFC, then it’s so advanced as to make you dizzy.
Even if you ever tried printing with Windows Forms, then printing in WPF is a bit of a revelation.

So how does it work?

Most of the printing stuff is in the System.Printing namespace, and a good starting place is the PrintDialog class.
By instantiating the PrintDialog class, you can display the standard xp or vista print dialog to allow the user to choose where to print something and how.

What else does it give you?

You can call two different methods to do printing:
PrintVisual - allows you print any class that derives from System.Windows.Media.Visual - which is a lot
PrintDocument - allows you to print any DocumentPaginator, e.g. FlowDocument or XpsDocument.

And it just works

Using Document Outline in VS2008 with WPF

I have recently rediscovered Document Outline in VS2008.

It was something that I relegated, in my head at least, to the world of web

However, I thought about a week ago - wouldn’t it be very handy if it showed me my complex xaml in a tree.
Lo and behold it did, andI could click on each node and go straight to the relevant DataTemplate

It was a nice and clean way to navigate the page, and dare I say it, easier than using Blend.
Obviously Blend has a lot of great features not in VS2008, but is a bit designer like for me sometimes