🚀 go-pugleaf

tope@enea.se (Tommy Petersson) writes:
: We are doing a small application in Visual Basic 2.0 Pro, to run on
: Windows 3.1 clients in a Lan Manager Network.
: 
: Reports from our application need to be printed in landscape orientation
: on a Nec PostScript laser printer. This is easy by selecting landscape
: mode in Control Panel/Printer. However, everything else the users print
: should be portrait, and they of course don't want to manually change the
: preferences all the time.
: 
: There seem to be two choices here:
: 
: Let Visual Basic still use the "Printer" object, (which only works on
: the default printer). For every report in our application, set the printer
: to landscape, and reset it afterwards.
: 
: Forget about the Printer object, stuff the default printer, use Windows
: calls to get/change device context and don't mess with the default printer
: whatsoever.
: 
: Which is best? Or is there a better way of doing it?
: 
: In "your best solution" - how do you do it? (I have looked only briefly
: on the GetDeviceContext, ExtDeviceMode, Escape and other calls)
: 
: Pro's and con's?
: 
: -- 
: =============================================================================
:  Tommy Petersson              tope@enea.se              Enea Data AB, Sweden
: =============================================================================

Microsoft Support recommended me to use the Escape call, and sent me an
example. This example initially states that you shouldn't use Escape but
DeviceCapabilities/ExtDeviceMode instead...:-)

ExtDeviceMode and many other functions are not listed in the "Win 3.1 API Help"
file. MS Support didn't know this, and couldn't give any explanation. They
however had the same guess, that it may be problematic to implement them.
Maybe it's because of a problem to pass a parameter that is an address to
a structure containing a C string?

If anyone's interested: I found out that ResetDC can change paper
orientation during printing of a document, not only between documents as
with Escape. It's however not listed in "Win 3.1 API Help" either.

-- 
=============================================================================
 Tommy Petersson              tope@enea.se              Enea Data AB, Sweden
=============================================================================