It is a component whose main function is to provide print preview capability to Visual Basic 6.
We could say that it adds print preview to VB6’s Printer object.
1) It replaces the original Printer object with a new
object that is 100% compatible with it, a direct replacement.
To do so you need to add the following code to your program:
Public Property Get Printer() As Printer
Set Printer = PrinterReplacement
End Property
Public Property Set Printer(nPrinter As Printer)
Set PrinterReplacement = nPrinter
End Property
2) It also has a control, the PrintPreview control.
In order to make it work, you need to put the printing code inside the PrepareReport event of one of these controls, or to call the print procedure from there.
Private Sub PrintPreview1_PrepareReport(Cancel As Boolean)
Printer.Print "Hello World."
' more printing code
'
End Sub
3) Call the ShowPreview method of the PrintPreview control.
PrintPreview1.ShowPreview
Instead of calling the print procedure directly, now you call the ShowPreview method of the PrintPreview control (from the command button, toolbar button, menu option or from where you previously called the print procedure).
That’s it, you should now have print preview in your program by doing these 3 simple steps.
1) Your code should be prepared to handle any paper size, by taking into
account the page size from the Printer.ScaleWidth and Printer.ScaleHeight properties, and not assuming certain
fixed size like Letter (for instance).
2) Now your code doesn’t need to care about margins, that’s automatically handled by the component.
Printer.ScaleWidth and Printer.ScaleHeight are all writable space now.
If your code handles margins, you’ll have to remove that from your code.
3) You don’t need to care about page numbers, they are now automatically handled by the component too. If your printing routine adds page numbers, you should remove that from the code.
4) If you don’t want to remove your margins and page numbers, you can make the print preview work, you need to set these properties:
PrintPreview1.HandleMargins = False
PrintPreview1.PrintPageNumbers = False
PrintPreview1.AllowUserChangePageNumbers = False
The user will lose the ability to change margins and page numbers properties from the component’s user interface, but your existing code can work without having to do these changes.
That is shown in Sample 6 of the sample projects.
5) If your form is shown modally, you’ll need to declare the PrintPreview control event procedures as Public instead of Private.
It can print the MSFlexgrid/ MSHFlexgrid with a single line of code, with
the method PrintGrid.
You could also use it to print any RecordSet, assigning it to the DataSource of a grid that does not need to be visible.
Together with this document should be another one that has all the property, method, and event references explained. Also constants and other component objects.
The online version is at www.balkesoft.com/bsprinter/docs/reference
The user interface (of the dialog boxes, such as the Print Preview dialog box) has built-in support for several languages. In the current version it supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic.
Support for other languages can be added as shown on Sample 27 (under ‘Advanced samples 2’).
For languages that are not supported, English will be used.
The usage is very simple and straightforward (most of the times), just add a PrintPreview control to the form and do the steps listed above. But it still allows many customizations and to do some special things. Most of them are covered in the sample projects.
You don’t need to learn all this to start using it, but if you want to know how to do something, the samples are there to see how.
The sample projects list is:
1 - Hello World
2 - Positioning on page
3 - Print FlexGrid
4 - Print RichTextBox
5 - Save PDF file
6 - Full backward compatibility
7 - Show more pages by default
8 - Set the default Orientation
9 - Print using PrintEx method (for printing Unicode and more)
10 - Allow or disallow user actions
11 - Show margins
12 - Show Print and Page setup from the form menu
13 - Remember user preferences
14 - Set a Footer or Header on every page
15 - Print watermarks
16 - Print form and controls
17 - Use the Auxiliary button
18 - Set the starting page number to other than 1
19 - Page numbers settings
20 - Change default margins
21 - Change the default grid style when printing a grid
22 - Customize User Interface look
23 - Save PDF from a toolbar button
24 - Advanced Footer and Header printing
25 - Report with dynamic table of contents
26 - API Drawing
27 - Translate the user interface to another language
28 - Use in Class modules
29 - Global event handler
This is the text to add to the manifest file in SxS installations:
<file name="BSPrin10.ocx">
<typelib tlbid="{451B73A5-1563-45D5-A6AC-7B2B7D30B778}" version="1.1" flags="control" helpdir="" />
<comClass clsid="{C4E98C24-F349-4D2B-A7D7-DF49994E208B}" tlbid="{451B73A5-1563-45D5-A6AC-7B2B7D30B778}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="BSPrinter.Global" />
<comClass clsid="{04E0110C-1F98-4908-8421-37D512A6425A}" tlbid="{451B73A5-1563-45D5-A6AC-7B2B7D30B778}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="BSPrinter.GridReportStyle" />
<comClass clsid="{09607631-1E0B-446C-B311-9D36D64316DA}" tlbid="{451B73A5-1563-45D5-A6AC-7B2B7D30B778}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="BSPrinter.PrintPreview" miscStatusIcon="recomposeonresize,cantlinkinside,insideout,activatewhenvisible,invisibleatruntime,setclientsitefirst" />
</file>
The component itself is ready to handle themed controls, DPI aware, DPI aware per monitor, DPI aware per monitor v2. But these features depend on how the host program is manifested.
It is also ready to handle non-integer twips-per-pixel settings, different system font sizes, high contrast themes, Unicode languages and right-to-left languages on its user interface.
The component has no dependencies, only the ocx file needs to be distributed with your application.