Printing to PDF

Richard_And_Trisha

I am doing research on how to print to pdf from the Printing Demo in your example folder.

what I did is to add a whole bunch of rows (more than one page) in DrawInvoicePage()

what I see is the bottom simply got cut off.

Garry

You’re not doing anything wrong. The printing system does not automatically flow content onto another page. Each RenderPage call provides a fixed-size Graphics canvas, much like drawing into a Canvas control.

The demo hard-codes two pages:

Page 1 calls DrawInvoicePage().
Page 2 calls DrawNotesPage().

Adding more rows to DrawInvoicePage() therefore continues drawing down page 1. Once the drawing passes the bottom of the page, it is clipped; it does not spill onto page 2 automatically.

For a variable-length invoice, you need to paginate the rows yourself:

Calculate how many rows fit between the table header and footer.
Divide the invoice rows into pages.
Set job.PageCount to the resulting number of pages.
In RenderPage, use context.PageIndex to choose which group of rows to draw.
Redraw the invoice heading, table header and footer on each page.

For example, if 14 rows fit on each page, page 1 draws rows 0–13, page 2 draws rows 14–27, and so on.

The existing example demonstrates the low-level printing workflow, but I agree that it does not make this pagination requirement obvious.

Richard_And_Trisha

how to count number of line when you a variety of font size to cater for??

how about the multiline item and description in the 1st and 2nd column??

do the counting line starting in the middle exclude the top portion???

maybe the printing demo should include code to show how to count and add page break.

I still like the idea of creating html and send to something to convert to pdf

I have look into headless chrome which is troublesome to install for cross platform and the ability to do things is not as good as wkhtmltopdf but then headless chrome is more modern and take care of other things wkhtmltopdf cannot do.

I look into weayprint but need python installed. something else need node.js installed ( I think puppeteer)

Garry

Here is an updated version of the PDF example that will ship in the next release. Hopefully this will demonstrate what you need to do.

printing-demo-studio-2685objo.zip

9kB

Richard_And_Trisha

I am looking at the printing demo file,
I am try to add more row into the project and I found the method call "DrawInvoiceRow" but cannot find it the list of method...

Richard_And_Trisha

when I go to the source folder for the window, use my BBEdit, I can see the DrawInvoiceRow as Private Sub BUT not show inside Objo Studio..
the other thing I cannot see in the IDE but can see in editor is the


  Private Property InvoiceItems As Array(Of String) = [ _
        "Discovery workshop", _
        "Application wireframes", _
        "Navigation prototype", _

   Private Property InvoiceDescriptions As Array(Of String) = [ _
        "Requirements review and a prioritised implementation plan.", _
        "Responsive window layouts covering the primary desktop workflows.", _
        "A clickable prototype with keyboard and pointer navigation.", _

    Private Property InvoiceAmounts As Array(Of String) = [ _
        "240.00", "360.00", "180.00", "300.00", "275.00", "540.00", _
        "420.00", "260.00", "220.00", "160.00", "190.00", "310.00", _
        "480.00", "265.00", "175.00", "390.00", "285.00", "250.00", _

cannot see in the IDE either for the InvoiceItems , InvoiceDescriptions and InvoiceAmounts

this is what I see when trying to copy the 3 property mention above and all I see is as follows

Private Property InvoiceItems As Array(Of String) = [ _

Private Property InvoiceDescriptions As Array(Of String) = [ _

Private Property InvoiceAmounts As Array(Of String) = [ _

Garry

Apologies - I sent you a corrupted project file. My mistake. This should work:

printing-demo-studio-2685-correctedobjo.zip

8kB

Richard_And_Trisha

Garry check and it is perfect now!!!! I purpose put a more row and it work perfect.

what if I want to have more row in the explanation page for how pagination work, do I need to another class for NotePagination very similar to the InvoicePagination??

Garry

Glad to hear the corrected example is working.

Yes. If the explanation section can contain a variable number of steps, it needs the same kind of pagination. The current demo assumes exactly one explanation page and adds 1 to InvoicePageCount, so enough additional steps would eventually be clipped.

A separate NotePagination class would be a sensible approach because notes have different measurement and drawing rules from invoice rows. It would:

Measure each note using the same font and wrapping width used when drawing.
Record which notes fit on each page.
Set TotalPageCount to InvoicePageCount + NotePageCount.
Use context.PageIndex - InvoicePageCount to select the appropriate notes page.
Redraw the explanation heading on every notes page.

I would not reuse InvoicePagination directly because it contains invoice-specific logic for columns, row heights and the totals block. If both sections became substantially more complicated, their common page-fitting logic could later be extracted into a reusable paginator, but a separate NotePagination class would be the clearest solution here.