CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#printing
Saurabh
Saurabh

Reputation: 1065

Printing to a Dot Matrix Printer

I am printing a rdlc report to Dot matrix printer using this code . The report is in the format of a bill receipt. What i want is that the printer should stop exactly at the point where the receipt is fully printed (i.e. the end of the text to be printed) and not take in the rest of the paper and print nothing on it.

As loads of receipts are to be printed and there can be long queues, it will be time consuming if the end user has to reload the paper (which has been wasted) back to the printer. Hence i am looking for way by which the printer can stop the paper intake as soon as the text to be printed is complete.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3457

Answers (1)

dthorpe
dthorpe

Reputation: 36082

It sounds like what you're asking for is how to print receipts as a continuous stream, instead of page by page. The code you linked to is entirely page driven and page oriented. You can work within a page-dominated view system, but you're going to have to do extra work.

You should be able to print multiple things on one page by changing the PrintPage code to output more than one image chunk per page. You will have to manage the offset of each rectangle to place the 2nd image below the 1st, and you will have to figure out what you want to do with the next report page does not fit on the space remaining on the current page. I expect the output will be clipped to the current page, so if you draw outside the page boundaries (past the end of the page) nothing will be output.

You could choose to advance to the next page when the next report image does not fit in the space remaining on the current page.

Or, you could print as much as will fit on this page, and then print the rest of that report image on the top of the next page. To do this, you will need to calculate the intersection of the remaining space on page 1 and the report image rectangle, and save the height of that intersection. End the page. When page 2 rolls around, print that same report image again, but this time offset the output rect by the height of the rectangle that was printed on the previous page. This is assuming a clipping rectangle is already in place on the print device handle (which is very likely).

The downside of splitting a report across pages like this is that you may end up with graphs or even lines of text that are cut off or split between pages. These will be hard to read. If you know the font height and line spacing and how the report is laid out I suppose you could make a calculated guess about where the lines of text fall in the output rectangle and round your output rectangle down to the nearest whole multiple of the line height, but this is getting deep into hacky kludge territory.

Upvotes: 3

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