Question

What is the best way to print stuff from c#/.net?

The question is in regard to single pages as well as to reports containing lots of pages.

It would be great to get a list of the most common printing libs containing the main features and gotchas of each of them.

[Update] for standard windows clients (or servers), not for web apps, please.

Answer 1

For reports, I use the RDLC control.

For everything else, I use the inherent printing objects within .NET.

Edit The inherent printing objects are all found in the System.Drawing.Printing namespace. When you use the PrintDialog or the PrintPreviewDialog in a WinForms (or WPF) application, it is to these objects that you’re turning over control.

The fundamental concept is that you’re drawing to the printer. The simplest form of this is:

Sub MyMethod()      Dim x as New PrintDocument      AddHandler x.PrintPage, AddressOf printDoc_PrintPage      x.Print End Sub Sub printDoc_PrintPage( sender as Object,  e as PrintPageEventArgs)       Dim textToPrint as String= '.NET Printing is easy'       dim printFont as new Font('Courier New', 12)       dim leftMargin as int= e.MarginBounds.Left       dim topMargin as int = e.MarginBounds.Top       e.Graphics.DrawString(textToPrint, printFont, Brushes.Black, leftMargin, topMargin) End Sub 

What’s happening here is that when my object (x) is sent the print command, it raises the ‘PRINT PAGE’ event (which is designed to print 1 page at a time). This event then uses the Graphics attribute of the PrintPageEventArgs to draw the relevant string directly to the print spooler.

Here’s one tutorial, and a quick Google search for ‘.NET printing tutorial’ returns a bit over 200K results.