Chapter 31. Printing
This chapter covers
- Understanding the printing API
- Printing onscreen content
- Scaling content for print
- Getting data from a service for a report
- Creating headers, footers, and more
The support for binding and validation, WCF RIA Services, and out-of-browser trusted applications are all major factors in making Silverlight useful for business application development. But most business, even today, run on a serious amount of paper. In those places, a development platform simply can’t be used unless it has good support for printing.
Many business applications need to print paper forms and reports as a standard part of their process. Large-scale applications typically farm out that functionality to a server somewhere with centralized print systems. I’ve seen systems like this that require a whole dedicated print room, with printing, paper folding, and envelope stuffing machines all combined. Most other applications, especially those used in smaller businesses, departmental applications, and consumer applications, use printers directly mapped and available on the client workstation. For those applications, platform support for printing is essential.