Chapter 19. Printing
This chapter covers
- An overview of the printing API
- How to print onscreen content
- How to scale content for print
- Getting data from a service for a report
- Creating headers, footers, and more
Silverlight 4 is the first release that can be considered truly “ready for business.” The support for binding and validation, WCF RIA Services, and out-of-browser trusted applications are all major factors in this. One equally important reason is the added support for printing.
Many business applications need to print paper forms and reports as a standard part of their process. Very large-scale applications typically farm that functionality out to a server somewhere with centralized print systems. Most other applications use printers directly mapped and available on the client workstation. For those applications, platform support for printing is essential.
Printing support opens up other nonbusiness scenarios as well. Now you can make that coloring-book creator or recipe application you’ve had in your “cool app ideas” folder. I joke about printing, but I used to print directions before I had a GPS, and flight information before it was synchronized to my phone via exchange. There are still many interesting and legitimate uses of printing inside and outside of business.