INF: Banding, Printing, and the Number of Bands

ID Number: Q72691

3.00

WINDOWS

Summary:

Banding is a printing technique used to print full-page graphics on

raster devices such as dot-matrix printers. In banding, an application

prints an image by dividing the image into several bands (or slices)

and sending each band to the printer separately.

To properly implement banding, an application should never make

assumptions about the number, size, or the ordering of bands that will

be provided by a printer driver. Making assumptions can cause problems

because these values can vary depending on the amount of free memory

that is available and the printer driver that is being used. The

correct method of determining the size and the starting position of

bands is to call the escape function NEXTBAND. This escape function

takes as a parameter a LPRECT, which points to a data structure that

will receive the coordinates of the next band. The NEXTBAND escape

function sets the band rectangle to the empty rectangle when printing

reaches the end of the page.

For more information on the NEXTBAND escape function, see pages 12-39

and 12-40 of the "Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit Reference

Volume 2."