Print Preview Overview

Purpose

Provides a framework for creating print previews.

Architectural relationships

Symbian OS handles printing and print previewing as a special case of drawing to a device context. Printing functionality, apart from the print job setup classes in the Print Framework API and the preview framework in this API, belongs to the Printing API, part of the Graphics subsystem. An application typically uses the same device-independent drawing code to draw a print preview as is does to do printing.

UI variants may provide stock print preview dialogs. It is normal for applications to use these dialogs rather than the Print Preview API directly.

Description

The API has two key concepts: print preview operation, and print preview parameters.

Print preview operation

The preview operation is initialised with a print job (CPrintSetup, as defined in the Print Framework API) and a callback to the application code that draws the preview pages.

It is provided by CPrintPreviewImage.

Print preview parameters

Parameters for a preview operation, such as colours for background and shadows, are encapsulated in TPrintPreviewFormat.

See also

Using Print Framework

Print Framework Overview