Hi everybody...

I need some help with printing in Visual Basic 2005: i have lots of customers that have dot-matrix printers, and, to be more specific, epson tm series of receipt printers (i have installed 1.61 epson tm windows driver). When i print using the PrintDocument, the output are beatiful, but painful slow. So, i want to print header of the receipt in the new fashion, but the rest of receipt (the data) in the traditional factory printerfont. I already studied the print powerpack, but only supports truetype fonts. Any idea? Thanks in advance to community.

The following code lists all the fonts that are supported by Printer Compatibility Library:

    Dim Printer As New Microsoft.VisualBasic.PowerPacks.Printing.Compatibility.VB6.Printer

    For i As Integer = 0 To Printer.FontCount - 1
            Console.WriteLine(Printer.Fonts(i))
    Next
 

Hi Mr. Yun.

Thanks for taking your time to reply my message.

I can comment that im aware of FontCount property. in fact, in my tests, i replaced console.writeline with a checkedlistbox, to see the available fonts. The problem consist that im very needed to print receipts in "text-mode", instead of "graphic" truetype mode. The readme clearly outlines "this powerpack only support truetype fonts", that are useless to me, 'cos graphics printing are very very slow in dot-matrix printers.Im translating a 10-year old DOSfoxpro program, to a new visual basic 2005/SQL 2005equivalent, but i find in visual basic 2005 print routines a big wall to accomplish my task, since my clients (some hundreds) will complain for printing speed (and that customers dont have planned to change the printers just 'cos the new software print slow). The powerpack its a step more to make swift change from old VB6 apps to new VB, but i think MSFT need to present a print powerpack 2.0 that supportsprinter-default fonts. Meanwhile... you have more ideas how to workaround this problem?

Thanks again for your patience.

Bernardo Salazar

Trythis:

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic.PowerPacks.Printing.Compatibility.VB6

Dim Printer As New Printer

Printer.PrintQuality = vbPRPQDraft

Printer.Print("Heading 1")

Printer.EndDoc

It still uses Truetype font, but it will be faster.

Hi,

In a shell or ( DOS ) command line window you can do this>>

Thisshould be faster if your printer is a parallel port one, it should use the default setting or current setting of the built in printer typeface - font.

I don't know if you can do this with a printer on one of the USB ports.

I don't know how to send a command like this to a shell window from VB.Net either.

Regards,

S_DS

Hi Mr Yun, greetings from Venezuela

I can comment that i already tried the print.printquality method, but i obtained a blank output. Also, i tried with PrinDocument's property DefaultPageSettings.PrinterResolution.Kind=Printing.PrinterResolutionKind.Draft, with the same result. As i imagine, dot-matrix printer driversdont have a "draft" mode. so, the driver don't understand what is draft, and simply print empty spaces.

The user spidermans suggested the use of DOS shell, i think that is a valid option, but, with a high-tech programming language like Visual Basic 2005, the use of shellto print a text file its like back to the cavern ages, and i dont like this type of "patches" in my programs. Its code elegance related thing. I think the code need to be beautiful inside (forthe programmer's pleasure), and outside (for user's easyness).

I will appreciate more ideas, but at this point im grateful for receiving your attention.

Bernardo Salazar

Estimated spiderman's darkside

I feel grateful for your interest in help me, i will take your advice in consideration, since not are a elegant solution, but in last instance...

In retribution, take note how to run external apps fron VB.NET

imports system.diagnostincs

...

...

Dim myProcess As System.Diagnostics.Process = New System.Diagnostics.Process()

myProcess.StartInfo.FileName = "calc.exe"

myProcess.StartInfo.WindowStyle = System.Diagnostics.ProcessWindowStyle.Normal

myProcess.Start()

Thanks again for your time.

Bernardo Salazar

Hi,

Process.Start method will run launch CMD.Exe but i've been unable to pass any argument(s) to it like

Process.Start( CMD.Exe, "Dir C:\")

it might be>>

Process.Start( "CMD.Exe", "Dir C:\")

i can't remember if 1st set of quotes are needed around the application name to Start.

Regards,

S_DS

Hi Vishnu,

That seems like a very odd error to me.

Regards,

S_DS

hi

try

Printer.PaperSize = vbPRPSUser to set paper size (no need to set length & width)



printer.killdoc to stop printing


i think it will work