The .NET platform provides a printing api you can use for printing your reports. This api can however be very slow if you are printing on a dot Matrix printer.
This is due to the fact that the platform always prints in graphic mode.
If you do not need to print graphics it makes more sense to print in Text Mode. This will result in a light weighted and fast printing.
RTextPrinter provides an easy to use api for printing text mode reports. It will handle the communication with the printer and all printer configuration commands in a transparent manner for you.
Even if you use text mode printer you will still be able to use the following features:
- Font selection (Courier ...)
- Font style (bold, italic and underlined)
- Font size (characters per inch)
- Lines (vertical and horizontal) and rectangles
- Character set managing and charater value mapping
- Other: subscripts and superscripts, double wide, landscape format and interline spacing
Note that the set of available features depends on the printer (see features table in the documentation ).
Supported printer command sets:
- Epson ESCP and ESCP2 or compatible
- HP-PCL5 or compatible
- HP-PCL 3 (known also as Laset Jet Plus Emulation)
- IBM Proprinter or compatible
- IBM PPDS
- Diablo
- Plain (no features).