Chapter 18. Printing, documents, and XPS
This chapter covers:
- Printing FlowDocuments
- Synchronous and asynchronous printing
- Printing FixedDocuments
- Saving XPS documents
- Exploring modern art
Do you remember the paperless office? We were reading about it in our flying car the other day and decided that it was one of those concepts that sounded good, but never quite got off the ground. Whether this is because too many people aren’t yet comfortable giving up paper or the technology isn’t yet quite a reasonable replacement, we aren’t sure.
The fact is that most applications have to provide some mechanism for printing. Even for applications that eschew paper, there’s often a need to provide data in an easily transferable format such as Adobe’s PDF format. Yet, we’ve noticed that most Windows programming guides manage to skirt talking about printing. We think we know the reason for this—up until now, printing from Windows has been a royal pain. Even with Windows Forms, which made things a little better, printing was always one of those tasks to assign to the developer you liked least and who you could then happily blame for your whole schedule slipping.[1]
1 One of these days we might be compelled to write a book about the silliness of most software schedules and how to really plan and deliver software. You should call our publisher and tell them you want that book!