🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm interested in buying/building a utility which can print text,
tables, and graphs.  The idea is to take information that
the user sees on screen and turn it into word processor quality output
(i.e. headers, footers, various fonts, and embedded graphs and tables
preferrably at the resolution of the printer [300dpi]).  The hope is
to be able to be able to use this utility with VB apps and with SDK apps.

I'm currently trying to figure out if their is an easy way to do this
is.  Any ideas?

One fairly complicated idea is to get the printer object display
context (hDC) and manually work through all the text, tables, and
graphs rastering each into the hDC.  In the case of text, this would
involve line breaking, checking font heights, positioning the cursor,
writing letters into the hDC, and moving the cursor down a line.  We
have a graph library which can write itself into an hDC.  Tables would
be a special case of the Text display functions.  Additionally, the
code would have to detect end of page, maybe output a page number, etc.

The questions I'm interested in are:
1) Are there easier ways to do this?
2) Are there commercially available libraries of code which do this?
   If not, are there libraries which get us part of the way there?
3) If we have to go with the idea described above should it be written
   in Visual Basic, as a static library, or as a DLL?
3) If we have to go with the idea described above, how long will it
   take to code?

Thanks,
Steve


--
===============================================================================
DOMAIN: sbchanin@ai.mit.edu                                       Steven Chanin