Fundamentals of Printing

Introduction

If you use the MFC Application to create a view-based application, the wizard would give you to option to support printing:

If you accept this default to provide printing in your application, the wizard would create a ready-made menu:

Notice that the toolbar is also equipped with a button that displays a printer. This indicates that you should be able to print something you would have drawn using the OnDraw() event.

For example, you can draw a picture or bitmap to display to the user. Consider the following image:

Here is a way of displaying this picture in a view:

void CDecorationView::OnDraw(CDC* pDC)
{
	CDecorationDoc* pDoc = GetDocument();
	ASSERT_VALID(pDoc);
	if (!pDoc)
		return;

	CBitmap bmpFlower;
	CDC memDCFlower;

	bmpFlower.LoadBitmap(IDB_FLOWER1);
	memDCFlower.CreateCompatibleDC(pDC);
	CBitmap *bmpPrevious = memDCFlower.SelectObject(&bmpFlower);

	pDC->BitBlt(10, 10, 450, 563, &memDCFlower, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);

	pDC->SelectObject(bmpPrevious);
	// TODO: add draw code for native data here
}

This would produce:

To print this, on the main menu, you would click File -> Print… and you would notice that only a small picture prints

This indicates that, when it comes to default printing, What You See on the monitor is not exactly What You Get on the Printer.