This is a refinement of a .BAS module I answered a question thread with.
Basically the module has some helper functions for printing. These let you print in a non-WYSIWYG manner in a sort of "desktop publishing" layout approach and get decent quality results compared to crude approaches like printing VB Forms. It isn't really a "reporting" technique, though since everything it can print could be taken from databases or files you could use it for some simple kinds of reporting that create more of a "document" than lines of report text.
At this point you can print a number of things with it, each item laid out on a sort of "box" within a page. These things now include:
To get a better idea of what this does you almost have to run the demos. They are easier to test if you have some sort of virtual printer device(s), such as a PDF printer or Microsoft's XPS Document Writer or Office Document Image Writer or something.
They all use the same Form2, which is a simple "printer picker" dialog box.
Demo1 does a little of everything to print a single page. It is more complex than the others, so I recommend you begin by looking at Demo2, the simplest. If you run Demo1 in the IDE you may get a "collating sequence" exception. This is a Jet Text IISAM incompatibility within the VB6 IDE. Just run it a second time. Compiled programs won't have this issue. But Demo1 is a good one to go ahead and print to a physical color printer. The print quality isn't too bad.
Demo2 prints from a RichTextBox loaded with a sample document. All it adds is pagination and page numbering.
Demo3 does the same thing for another sample document. What it adds beyond Demo2 is two-column printing.
Printing an MSChart causes it to "blink out" quite visibly for a bit, and I have no fix yet. However this is probably a small penalty to get better chart printing.
Only tested on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
The attachment has all 3 demo projects and some sample data (which makes it as big as it is).
Basically the module has some helper functions for printing. These let you print in a non-WYSIWYG manner in a sort of "desktop publishing" layout approach and get decent quality results compared to crude approaches like printing VB Forms. It isn't really a "reporting" technique, though since everything it can print could be taken from databases or files you could use it for some simple kinds of reporting that create more of a "document" than lines of report text.
At this point you can print a number of things with it, each item laid out on a sort of "box" within a page. These things now include:
- Text (String) data.
- Images.
- RichTextBox contents.
- MSHFlexGrid contents (within limits, if you have too many rows this doesn't work, if it is too wide it doesn't work well).
- MSChart contents (within limits, you may need to fiddle with more properties for fancy charts).
To get a better idea of what this does you almost have to run the demos. They are easier to test if you have some sort of virtual printer device(s), such as a PDF printer or Microsoft's XPS Document Writer or Office Document Image Writer or something.
They all use the same Form2, which is a simple "printer picker" dialog box.
Demo1 does a little of everything to print a single page. It is more complex than the others, so I recommend you begin by looking at Demo2, the simplest. If you run Demo1 in the IDE you may get a "collating sequence" exception. This is a Jet Text IISAM incompatibility within the VB6 IDE. Just run it a second time. Compiled programs won't have this issue. But Demo1 is a good one to go ahead and print to a physical color printer. The print quality isn't too bad.
Demo2 prints from a RichTextBox loaded with a sample document. All it adds is pagination and page numbering.
Demo3 does the same thing for another sample document. What it adds beyond Demo2 is two-column printing.
Printing an MSChart causes it to "blink out" quite visibly for a bit, and I have no fix yet. However this is probably a small penalty to get better chart printing.
Only tested on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
The attachment has all 3 demo projects and some sample data (which makes it as big as it is).
