Creating Output for the Printer

Unlike the original BASIC, Visual Basic presents a lot of issues to deal with when you print text. BASIC is line-oriented; Visual Basic generates output a page at a time. Each character in BASIC takes up the same amount of space, so aligning text into columns isn’t a big deal. With Visual Basic, characters can vary in height and width. Also, you can now include graphics ranging from a simple line to a bitmapped image—an option that didn’t exist in the original BASIC.

In the following examples, I’m going to perform a number of operations on a PictureBox control to illustrate how to perform these functions. The beauty of Visual Basic is that the same operations can be performed on a Printer object or a PictureBox control without any changes.

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