I’m working with a WinForms app. I have an RDLC report that will be printed on 11×17 and then folded (printer supports folding). I’m rendering to EMF and drawing to pages of a PrintDocument. This works fine except for folding.
What I’d like to do is store the settings that make the printer fold. The users would select a preset from a dropdown and the app would select the printer, the paper size, the tray, whether to duplex, and whether to fold. Storing the PrinterSettings object covers most of this, but doesn’t save the folding option.
I first attempted to store/retrieve something I read about called DEVMODE. For reference: http://nicholas.piasecki.name/blog/2008/11/programmatically-selecting-complex-printer-options-in-c-shar/. What I found is that even though I had extra data specific to the driver, all the bytes were 0 regardless of what driver-specific settings I changed. I’m not sure where I went wrong with this, but I abandoned it and looked at the printing capabilities in WPF.
I found that I could configure a PrintTicket for my settings, store it, and retrieve it later. It seems a bit convoluted just to save the settings, but I think I have it working. At least it seems to show up correctly in the PrintDialog. However, I’m now stuck trying to figure out how to print my report.
As I understand it, I can’t take a PrintDocument from WinForms printing and use it in WPF. I also read EMF format is not supported in WPF. I thought I would render each EMF to a bitmap, then print those. But the text in my report is fuzzy and I’m not having any luck clearing it up.
Starting with a stream that contains EMF bytes that I know will render sharply with PrintDocument, I test trying to save to a file. It seems no settings that I provide will save with crisp text.
var pageImage = new Metafile(stream);
pageImage.Save(filename);
All this just to add the ability to fold. Am I just completely on the wrong track? I don’t see how this should be so hard. I guess I either need to find another way to save/restore custom printer settings or I need a way to render these EMF files better.
I also tried rendering the report directly to BMP format and it’s also poor quality.
I tried something slightly different and it worked! I reused my original PrintDocument code and printed to an XPS file. Then I printed the XPS file using my PrintTicket and it works fine.