Printing PDF

[matpublic]

Hello.

I've searched the web to find a 'easy' way to output a PDF to a printer
(probably non-Postscript 3). However I have had no success.

I'm using reporting services to generate a three dimential byte array
to represent the PDF documents, then I want to output the documents to
the printer (depending on the document the printer trays may differ or
duplex may be on/off).

The documents are then archived to a database.

I don't really want reporting services to output the documents to the
printer, as I need to ensure that all the documents are output
successfully before printing.

Any info would be welcome. I'd like to steer away from commercial
objects due to cost.

Many thanks

Mat

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Mat,

You are going to need some sort of component that will be able to handle
the printing of the PDF stream. You need something that will be able to
interpret the format of the PDF and then draw the contents to the device
context of the printer. Unfortunately, I don't know of any free components
that do this. You will have to search for one that is free.

Hope this helps.

 

[SharpCoderMP]

as far as i know there is no free component that can do that. there is
iText.net but it can only write PDF's *not* read them.

 

[Lucian Wischik]

I'm using reporting services to generate a three dimential byte array
to represent the PDF documents, then I want to output the documents to
the printer (depending on the document the printer trays may differ or
duplex may be on/off).

I don't understand.

(1) There already exists a free piece of software to send PDFs to the
printer. It's "Acrobat Reader". If you ShellExecute your pdf document
with the "print" verb, it will send it to the printer. Or maybe you
can use the "printto" verb which is what the shell uses when
dragging-and-dropping a file onto a printer? (in the worst cast
scenario, probably you could create several different "printers" all
of which point to the same actual physical printer, but which have
different papertray/duplex default options).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...asics_extending/fileassociations/fa_verbs.asp


(2) How can a 3d byte array represent a PDF document? A PDF document
is a 1-dimensional byte array that represents the PDF file format.

(3) Maybe you mean that you have a 3d byte array representing some
graphics bitmap that you want to print? In which case it seems that
the question is unrelated to PDFs entirely.