Printing woes :-(

[venerable bede]

I am trying to add some print functionality to my application which I thought would be easy but am not having much success.

I need to be able to print images which will include jpg., gif and multi-page tiff files. I was hoping to let windows do all the hard work but for the life of me cant figure it out.

Any Ideas ?

[jmcilhinney]

All .NET printing is done the same way. It's a piece of cake for simple stuff and it's extremely powerful and flexible for complex stuff. Create a PrintDocument object, call its Print method and handle its PrintPage event. In the PrintPage event handler you have the full power of GDI+ to print anything you want. In your case its a single call to e.Graphics.DrawImage.

[venerable bede]

You lost me a bit should come as no suprise to you :-)

I am creating a new ImagePrintDocument and I am using the PrintPreviewDialog box and all is well in the world........until I use a multi page tiff file.

It always displays and prints only the first page which I find most distressing :-(.

Basically I have no idea how to loop through the pages collection so it looks like more research is required. I shall get my pea sized brain onto it.

Thanks

[jmcilhinney]

I'm not really very experienced with image manipulation. Do you know how to access the multiple pages of the TIFF file? If so then printing multiple pages is simply a case of setting one property in the PrintPage event handler. Assuming that you can access a TIFF page by index it would look something like this:

Private pageIndex As Integer = 0
 
Private Sub PrintDocument1_PrintPage(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
                                     ByVal e As System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs) Handles PrintDocument1.PrintPage
    'Get the image to be printed.
    Dim imageToPrint As Image = myTiff.Pages(Me.pageIndex)
 
    'Print the image here.
 
    'Increment the page index.
    Me.pageIndex += 1
 
    'There are no more pages to print if the index has gone beyond the upper bound.
    e.HasMorePages = (Me.pageIndex < myTiff.Pages.Count)
 
    If Not e.HasMorePages Then
        'Reset the page index for the next run.
        Me.pageIndex = 0
    End If
End Sub

Note that that is almost certainly not valid code, but hopefully it illustrates the point.

If you don't know how to get at each page of a TIFF then that's another issue, not really related to printing specifically.

[jmcilhinney]

Just had a quick look at the Image class and it has a SelectActiveFrame method. I'm guessing that you'd use that to select a "current page" in a TIFF image, then accessing the Image itself would always access that page. That's just an educated guess mind you. I'd think that there would be examples on the Web.