Question

I have a timetable in memory, and need to be able to print it out.

The timetable will likely be many pages, each page will look quite similar:
A grid of cells, across the horizontal axis is time, and along the vertical axis is entities. Cell x, y will contain the allocation of a particular job to entity x at timeslot y.

I’m looking at the System.Drawing.Printing.PrintDocument class but it’s incredibly cumbersome. I need to set an event handler to the PrintDocument.PrintPage, yet there doesn’t appear to be any way to get the page number from the PrintPageEventArgs?

I just want to construct my document and call some Print() function. I suppose if I could get the page number within the event handler, I could construct the page layout on the fly with e.Graphics and GDI.

I could potentially even put together a HTML page using tables and print that – if I could somehow control what prints on what page?

Is there a better way to construct and print documents in C#?

The target machines do have Office installed, but they’re all different versions and I’ve had lots of trouble getting correct versions of the .Net/Office interop library to work with them.

Edit: I could potentially even create a temporary LaTeX file on the fly and compile it, then print it. This seems like a good solution, except that the target machines are locked and the users can’t install new software, hence I would need to bundle the LaTeX compiler with my program, and my compiler is almost 300MB.

Answer 1

Sounds to me like you’re giving up too soon. Handling the PrintPage event isn’t that difficult and since the event is raised sequentially, all you have to do is keep a page counter in that event. That’s how I’ve done it in the past with MetaFile images (printing Reporting Services reports through a web service call).