Question

we have a Silverlight 4 app that prints a multi-page report. When the number of pages exceeds 20 or 30 (depending on the computer), the printing completely blocks the computer and users are unable to use it.
That is due to the huge print job size – each page takes about 170MB, so a 10 page document results in nearly 2gig!
In a comment from the page http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/27/Silverlight_4_s_Printing_Support (see comment by Marshall Agnew from December 3, 2009) I found that “Silverlight Printing does currently allow users to specify Color/Grayscale, Orientation and Resolution(DPI)…”
However, I am unable to find any info as to how this is done.
We are printing a black and white document, text only, so grayscale (or even black&white, if that were possible) would be fine with us.
Thanks for any help on how to decrease the size of the print job or find an alternative solution to printing multi-page reports in SL4.
Jan

Answer 1

The problem is that silverlight print raw image bytes by rendering images from XAML. Not optimized at all.

Try generate XPS or PDF files from your client and allow the user to save it before print.

XPS are relatively easy to generate because they use XAML.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms771669.aspx