[Gambas-devel] Printing

[Rob]

On Thursday 06 November 2003 20:59, Andrés Calderón J. wrote:
> I would like know if there is a way to print the content of a
> TextArea or at least how to print a string variable (Printer).

Well, for example, try putting this code in the click event of a 
button marked "Print" (let's say you have a textarea named 
TextArea1)

Printer.setup ' brings up print settings dialog
Draw.begin(Printer)
Draw.Text(TextArea1.Text,200,200) 
Draw.end

This will kick out a page with the contents of the TextArea1 
object.  It seems to do odd things with blank lines though (like 
omit them.... sometimes.)  I just now updated the test wiki with 
the above example.

I see a big flaw with how this works in that sometimes you may 
want to interleave drawing on a printer and some other drawing 
surface (like a DrawingArea you're using as part of a user 
interface) but Draw.end causes the printer to kick out the page.  
I'll probably write a PrintDocument class/library at some point 
to buffer drawing events and let you print them whenever.  I 
also think I'd need a "Print" method to automatically keep track 
of "cursor position" as with VB's "Printer.Print" (which itself 
needs a lot of help.)

This question belonged on gambas-user hy the way, so if you have 
any more questions let's continue it over there.  gambas-devel 
is to discuss changes to the inner workings of gambas itself.

Rob