Visual Print Design for .NET

Question

I have a project that I'm working on and I need to be able to print out ID cards from the program. Are there any products out there that are reasonably priced so I can design a document for print and use it in .NET? I'm trying to avoid using System.Drawing from having to do it manually because when the company I work for needs to make changes to the ID card it will be a pain to change it later.

Answer 1

What about Microsoft Reports or Crystal Reports?

Answer 2

You could use Adobe Acrobat and one of the libraries out there for writing PDFs. That would let you design the document template in Adobe Acrobat, fill it out in code, and print it in code. There are some open source PDF writers and some commercial ones. The differences lie in the feature sets.

I've used PDFWriter in the past.

Answer 3

I've done something similar using a PowerPoint document as a template. I put fields or labels on the PP document and then programmatically fill them in. Obviously, adding or removing fields would require code changes, but the layout of the PP document could be changed easily.

Answer 4

Is using WPF an option? You can make a WPF UserControl as an individual card (and use the WYSIWYG designer to get it looking like you want), and then you can create a Window containing a grid full of cards, programmatically fill them, and print them out.