PRINTING CONCEPTS

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.

The following section describes the basic process and explains this backward-seeming approach. The sections after that explain how to print specific items such as shapes and text, and how to scale, center, and otherwise arrange the results.