printing multiple pages of a c# form

Question

Can anyone pease tell me how to print multiple pages of a c# form? I have a c# windows form with a panel control that has many controls (text boxes, labels, radio buttons, etc.) on it. If I try to print the panel I only get the first page printed wich is 30% of the panel. I will greatly appreciate if someone can tell me how to print the entire panel and not just the first page. I have tried the hasmorepages property wihtout any success.

dbailiff · Answer

FYI: I was having major performance issues and it turned out to be my transform function. The calls to the page settings were causing the printing to take several minutes when it only took a second or less to draw to the screen. Accessing these values seems to take up a lot of time. By also moving the multiplication and division out of this routine it sped it up greatly. I setup private members for the various PageSettings values and pre-loaded them once at the beginning. Now the print job only takes a few seconds like it should. private Point TransformPrintPoint(Point p System.Drawing.Graphics g) { // the Y value needs to get bumped the distance equal to the // length of the page multiplied by the page number // also take into account the margins otherwise stuff will disappear into the margins p.Y = p.Y - (iPage * iPageBottom); if (iPage > 0) p.Y = p.Y + iPage * (10 + iPrinterMargins); return p; }

dbailiff · Answer

I managed to find a solution for my problem. Your mileage may vary. I started by realizing that to print a graphics image across multiple pages was the same idea as the panel within a panel that is to show just part of the image was to use a clipping region. The idea is the same here except the page size is our clipping region. To get all of the image to print you just change the clipping region and print multiple times. Rather than try to calculate which part of the image needs to be printed I just printed the image multiple times with different xy offsets to simulate moving the clipping region. The drawback that I've experienced is that it can take awhile to draw each page and since you're redrawing the complete image for each page it's alot of wasted time. Note that the example below only compensates for printing multiple pages in the vertical Y direction but it wouldn't take much to apply the same concept to the X direction. private System.Drawing.Printing.PageSettings ps; private int iPage; private bool bPrinting; //this is the flag to tell the drawing routines we're printing private void myForm_PrintPage(object sender System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs e) { System.Drawing.Graphics g = e.Graphics; ps = e.PageSettings; bPrinting = true; DrawStuff(myImageData g); if ({...decide if there are more pages to print...}) { e.HasMorePages = true; iPage = {...calculate which page to show...}; } else e.HasMorePages = false; } private void DrawStuff(object data System.Drawing.Graphics g) { ... Point p = (data.x data.y); if (bPrinting) { p = TransformPrintPoint (p g); } p.Draw{object}(); ... } private Point TransformPrintPoint(Point p System.Drawing.Graphics g) { // the Y value needs to get bumped the distance equal to the // length of the page multiplied by the page number // also take into account the margins otherwise stuff will disappear into the margins p.Y = p.Y - (iPage * ps.Bounds.Bottom); if (iPage > 0) p.Y = p.Y + iPage * (10 + ((ps.Margins.Bottom*100) / ps.PrinterResolution.Y) + ((ps.Margins.Top*100) / ps.PrinterResolution.Y)); return p; }

dbailiff · Answer

I'm in the same boat. I've got a panel with free form graphics. I'm using one panel inside another to get autoscroll on the screen but I need to print the large image over multiple pages. If I find anything I'll let you know.