[Mono-list] Portable way to print

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Wed, 2004-12-29 at 15:25 -0500, Jeremiah McElroy wrote:
> There are, as far as I know, several .NET PDF libraries available. 
> PDFs are also, from what I've looked at, fairly easy to muck by hand
> so it would be fairly easy, in theory, to create a PDF on the fly.

Just be careful to get one which will work with Mono. Several of the
less expensive commercial libraries depend on Windows.forms and I don't
know if that works well in Mono for this task. There are two free
libraries on SF that support creating pdfs that work in mono. I can't
remember what they are, but I believe one was a port of the java iText
(correct?) library.

I found them by going to sf.net and browsing through all the projects
that were written in the C# programming language.

Forgive me for being so vague... I'm going from memory. Of the two free
libraries, one looked better for reports, the other looked like it was a
bit easier to use.

Let me also just chip in my 2 cents - as a linux user, I don't consider
a program producing a PDF for me to be an ideal printing solution. I
generally have a major distaste for PDF. I thought I was unique in that
until I read Jakob Nielson's article on the subject. Nielson is one of
the most highly regarded usability experts, even if he is a bit on the
puritan side of usability. cf.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html

Now, if that is your only choice, do what you must. I will do it if I
must. But if you can avoid it, I would suggest doing so unless you can
seamless integrate PDF viewing into your application.

If only HTML would support manual page breaks and setting of
headers/footers our printing problems would be over!
-- 
Matthew Nuzum <matt@followers.net>
www.followers.net - Makers of "Elite Content Management System"
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