Hi again Wolfgang (and other guys too),
I am now getting back into my coding / programming mode so as to occupy myself during the wet and dark Autumn and Winter months
Yes, I agree that printing anything, especially reports, should be as simple as possible - and FREE !!! Hopefully I can provide the 'free' part by eventually providing my X# classes to the Forum free of charge. Oh! and some suitable eNotes to help others get the most out of using the classes.
On the 'making things easy' side of things, this is what I discovered some ten years back after reading and studying Alwyn's VO text on 'Printing'. It is possible to hide from sight the complex methods which are needed to handle the coordinates required by each and every printer driver. These are a MUST.
I then continued to develop 'layers' of methods which successively made printing 'stuff' easier. Often one method using a more complex method, so it appears to hide the complex stuff 'under the hood'.
Years ago, in early versions of BASIC, we were spoiled by the fact that we could virtually say "print out 'hello world' " and we got a result hanging out of the printer.
In reality printing in Windows 10 is more complex that the above - BUT - I have it closer to being simple by design of my printing classes. Yes, either by default settings, or our own coded settings, we need to select an available printer, then choose a paper orientation, font family, font style, font colour, font weight, and position on what we may term as a 'page'.
Yes, a lot of these above settings can be set by defaults - BUT - they need to be set for the Windows .NET system to produce suitable output. The trick I found, over the years I have developed my printing classes, is to make things work the way the user / coder thinks, and not provide methods which are based on the way the computer does things.
So effectively I can now code .... use the default printer and on the 13th line down the page at 20% across the page, place the text "Hello World - we are printing! ". Notice my coordinate system is based on lines on pages, and how far across the page .... I don't touch the complex canvas coordinates which are different for each printer driver.
As you can imagine, quite a few required settings have been provided for us, but we could have specified then ourselves if we required then to be different. Depending on our wishes.
When it comes to reports, it is probably best to have a few Report classes, which range in their simplicity of the style of printed report they provide. Then there are less settings to worry about when we need simplicity.
However, if we wish to be able to print reports as complex as some of those made by "Reporting Services" from Microsoft, then we do need to be able to set many detailed settings, and understand more about report making than just producing a simple tabular format in a fixed font, with no sub-totals.
I think I can offer much to the X# Forum on the "Printing" topic, so watch this space ;-0)
Remember I have NOT used anything else since I started with VO, than my own printing classes, and I have printed a lot of commercial documentation over the years. No third part stuff for me !!
I am trying to convince Meinhard to allow me to produce a suitable set of support materials for some sessions in the April 2018 Cologne conference - fingers crossed that he gives me the OK. If I am to put in a lot of work on this stuff, then it is nice to know that there is real purpose to what I produce. And delivering a session or two in Cologne is a real purpose in my eyes.
I hope the above information makes sense to those who have not seen my printing class in use. It really is easy to get them to produce nice results, without the need to know just how half of the methods actually work, or what they do - many methods just provide a technical service to other more common sense methods - but they are totally required for printing success.
Cheers for now,
Regards to one and all,
Phil,
Wales, UK.
