ARCHIVE: TIPS & TRICKS
Printing project contents to a VB file
John Smiley
07.25.2000
Rating: -3.67- (out of 5)
Printing project contents to a VB file
I recently received an email from a reader who wanted to print the
contents of his Visual Basic project to a file.
For those of you not familiar with this Print feature of Visual Basic,
you can print an image of any or all of the forms in your Visual Basic
project, plus the code in those forms, to a printer for documentation
purposes.
In addition to printing directly to a printer, you can also route the
print to a text file -- either for archive purposes or for subsequent
printing.
The problem is that when my reader tried to view the output file using
his Notepad Editor, he reported seeing strange characters at the top of
the document, and when he printed the file from within Notepad, the
results were far from satisfactory.
What causes this is that when he directed the print output to a file,
his Windows default printer was set to a high tech model (either a
laser or an ink jet printer). The strange characters included in the
document were printer control characters that Windows inserted into the
file -- the same characters that Windows would have sent to the default
printer to ensure that the document printed properly...
Fortunately, the fix is easy.
To produce a file that can then be opened cleanly in an editor such as
Notepad, you must first install a Generic-Text Only Printer driver on
your system. You can do this by adding a Generic-Text Only Printer via
the Windows Print Manager, and then selecting this Printer as the
target printer in the VB Printer Dialog Box.
The result is that your output file will contain only text -- no
special Printer Control Characters.
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Written by John Smiley, MCP, MCSD and MCT, author, and adjunct
professor of Computer Science at Penn State University in Abington,
Philadelphia University, and Holy Family College. John has been
teaching computer programming for nearly 20 years.
John Smiley is president of Smiley and Associates,
http://www.johnsmiley.com/smass/smass.htm a computer consulting firm
located in New Jersey.
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