DESCRIPTION
If you ever need to develop a Windows application that prints invoices, cheques or similar on multi-part stationery you will notice that the Windows printer drivers are extremely unsuitable for this purpose! They insist on printing everything as graphics (WYSIWYG TrueType fonts etc), which, apart from being
very slow on a dot-matrix printer (which you need to use for multi-part stationery), makes it extremely difficult to line up your output with the pre-printed boxes (try getting a Windows printer driver to print exactly 6 lines to the inch and 10 characters to the inch, or whatever). The "Generic/Text-Only" driver provided with Windows sort of works, but always tries to be clever and format the layout - it just will not let you have total control over output. In fact, Microsofts official reply when queried about this was "do not use a dot-matrix printer with Windows - they are obsolete technology" - all very well, but how do you print your invoices?
Enter the TAsciiPrinter! This is a non-visual component for Delphi that enables you to write directly to the printer in ASCII code just like a DOS application did, bypassing the Windows printer driver altogether and giving total control back to you, the developer.
Key features and benefits:
Easily print the contents of a Delphi TMemo or TDBMemo.
Compatible with Julian Ziersch WPTools TWPRichText component.
Print to any port or to a file on disk.
Make use of the Windows print spooler to avoid conflicts with other print jobs.
Send individual bytes to the printer for full access to control codes.
Translate characters "on the fly".
Print selected lines of a memo without feeding a page (great for building up reports).
Configure printer control codes to suit your printer.
Save/Load settings to/from disk. |
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