Best way to handle printing of HTML in .NET?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Matthew
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M

Matthew

My Windows forms app generates HTML via a server-side XSL
transformation of XML out of a SQL server stored procedure. I'm
emedding the HTMLEditor control from
http://www.itwriting.com/htmleditor/index.php, and using a custom
print template.

The app by the way is for a homogenous intranet environment, printing
to a variety of different printers.

Generally this works tolerably, although it is pretty hard work
getting the print templates to work (basically I'm just using example
six from the samples in
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../hosting/printpreview/reference/reference.asp).

One problem I have now is that I need my app to print three identical
copies of a particular document with different backgrounds
(watermarks) on each, and I am not having too much luck.

I'm interested in guidance as to whether I would be better off using
either:

Meadco's scriptx product
http://www.meadroid.com/scriptx/about.asp
or
http://www.htmlprinting.com/

Would I be able to dispense with the HtmlEditor component? Would I get
performance improvements or better ease-of-use? And would they even be
able to handle my specific issue of three pages with different styles
on each?

Or can I get consitent appearance and what I want to do by sticking
with the basic print templates.
 
Matthew said:
My Windows forms app generates HTML via a server-side XSL
transformation of XML out of a SQL server stored procedure. I'm
emedding the HTMLEditor control from
http://www.itwriting.com/htmleditor/index.php, and using a custom
print template.
Click to expand...
Would I be able to dispense with the HtmlEditor component? Would I get
performance improvements or better ease-of-use? And would they even be
able to handle my specific issue of three pages with different styles
on each?
Click to expand...

As I read it, the sites you've referenced still depend on the print template
functionality to work. So you still need IE (in some shape or form), and you
still have the limitations of print templates.

If your main target is print, I wonder if you should transform your XML to
PDF rather than HTML? Adobe has a bunch of products for this. Also, a quick
Google brings up http://xmlpdf.com/ and http://antennahouse.com/. Finally
there are some open source projects using xsl-fo.

Tim
Borland's top execs interviewed:
http://www.itwriting.com/borlandtop.php


Tim
 
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