Introduction: Printing

LEADTOOLS printing functions are designed to work with Windows printing functions. Normally, you use Windows to select a device context (DC) and start the print job. LEADTOOLS functions let you scale and position one or more images in the printer DC. You use Windows functions to get the available page dimensions. You also use Windows functions to eject each page and to end the print job.

In most cases, you can scale and position an image on a printer DC with the same flexibility as when you display an image on a computer screen. You can let the printer handle any dithering or half-toning. However, if you halftone a bitmap, yourself, before sending it to a printer, you should resize the bitmap to the desired height and width, then use the halftone function, then send the image to the printer without scaling it. (You get bad results if you scale a half-toned image.)

In C, C++, Visual Basic, and Delphi, you can use the actual Windows printing functions, or their equivalents in the development system. However, printing with Microsoft FoxPro and older versions of Access is more limited, because they do not give you direct access to the printer DC. The LEADTOOLS ActiveX handles this problem by providing methods to start and stop the print job.

With Access 7.0, you can also add code to a report's Print event to include ActiveX images. Or, more simply, you can embed the LEAD OLE Server, which is provided as a separate toolkit component.