Printing contents of controls in C#?

Question

I have never printed anything using C#. I was just wondering what the standard way to do this was. On my form I have a few listboxes and a few textboxes. I would like to print their contents and show them in a print preview, with a nice layout in a table. Then from their I would like the user to be able to print.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

One method is summarized nicely here at CodeProject having a Print implementation. As for Print Preview, somebody has tackled an implementation here.

Answer 2

You will want to use System.Drawing.Printing libraries. You'll use the PrintDocument.Print method which you can find on the MSDN Page with Example

Answer 3

Here's a nice little tutorial on basic printing in C#. It deals with text but could be extended easily to draw anything else.

Printing in C# is very similar to custom painting in C#. The big difference is that the coordinate system is flipped from the screen representation and that you have to account for spanning of pages (if/when necessary.) The way you print is also a bit counter intuitive in that you have to initiate the print process and then handle the page print event.

Example:

Here is a simple example of a print event handler that assumes the presence of list box control named listBox1 with some items in it. It draws each item as well as a box around it.

private void printDocument1_PrintPage(object sender, System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs e)
{
 Font font = new Font("Arial", 10f);
 Graphics g = e.Graphics;
 Pen rectPen = new Pen(Color.Black, 2f);
 Brush brush = Brushes.Black;

 // find widest width of items
 for (int i=0; i<listBox1.Items.Count; i++)
  if(maxItemWidth < (int)g.MeasureString(listBox1.Items[i].ToString(), font).Width)
   maxItemWidth = (int)g.MeasureString(listBox1.Items[i].ToString(), font).Width;

 // starting positions:
 int itemHeight = (int)g.MeasureString("TEST", font).Height + 5;
 int maxItemWidth = 0;
 int xpos = 200;
 int ypos = 200;

 // print
 for (int i = 0; i < listBox1.Items.Count; i++)
 {
  g.DrawRectangle(rectPen, xpos, ypos, maxItemWidth, itemHeight );
  g.DrawString(listBox1.Items[i].ToString(), font, brush, xpos, ypos);

  ypos += itemHeight;
 }

 e.HasMorePages = false;
}