Programming Microsoft Visual C++

If you're depending on the Win32 API alone, printing is one of the tougher programming jobs you'll have. If you don't believe me, just skim through the 60-page chapter "Using the Printer" in Charles Petzold's Programming Windows 95 (Microsoft Press, 1996). Other books about Microsoft Windows ignore the subject completely. The Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library version 6.0 application framework goes a long way toward making printing easy. As a bonus, it adds a print preview capability that behaves like the print preview functions in commercial Windows-based programs such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to use the MFC library Print and Print Preview features. In the process, you'll get a feeling for what's involved in Windows printing and how it's different from printing in MS-DOS. First you'll do some wysiwyg printing, in which the printer output matches the screen display. This option requires careful use of mapping modes. Later you'll print a paginated data processing-style report that doesn't reflect the screen display at all. In that example, you will use a template array to structure your document so that the program can print any specified range of pages on demand.