Wednesday, July 23, 2003 - Version 0.99 is 82.8% complete - Wed, 23 Jul 2003

After several weeks of messing around with the Print and Print Preview functions, I figured I might as well finish it as best as I can.

I spent many hours looking for ways to get the selected cells to print. I looked into all the events in the Richview Edit, Selections and Table, plus searched the Richview newsgroup archives for other clues, and looked through the Richview source code for examples. Yes, it is possible, but will take some time to put all these “clues” together and find something that works. In his post back to me, Sergey said this is a known major problem with RichView. In another post back in April, he indicated he would hope to have the table cell selections working “this year” (i.e. 2003).

Considering that, I think it might be best now to consider the inability to print a selection of table cells as a “known problem”. Even if I don’t use a work around, it will be magically fixed when Sergey fixes it in RichView. At this point, I might as well leave it at that. If it is not fixed by the time Version 1.0 is ready, I’ll ask Sergey again if it can be worked on.

In the meantime, the Print Preview and Print functions now work okay. There’s lots I want to add (multi-page printing, etc.) but that will come after the initial release. You can Print All, Print selected pages (by page number), Print a selection (except as noted above), multi-copies, collate, and it all seems to work. If there is something selected, then that will be printed (or print-previewed) by default. Many programs do this and it is a nice convenience. Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer do not do this, and I find that very annoying. They don’t even give you any way of Print Previewing a selection. That is terrible. Sometimes, copying some parts of the user interface of these programs is not always desirable.

A few other little things: I have to load the selection into RVPrint and format it for previewing or viewing. If there is no selection, then the whole document is loaded (and page selection is handled automatically). But I have to be careful to reload if the user changes the option when the Print Dialog is open. Also, Print and Print Preview should use the same code to load the document or selection to ensure they will do the same thing. Then, when printing, the name of the file has to be passed to the printer so it will display in the Printer Queue. There are other little details like this to handle as well.

That’s about it for printing and print previewing for Version 0.99. I can mark these two items done.