Can you please add the feature of printing

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

I have been reading about the Aspose Word and the list of features. This is one of the controls that I am interested in buying (amongst others like PDF, chart and possibly Excel) as part of the application that we are developing that will launch in Q2 2004 in UK and Europe. Can you please add the feature of printing as well. By this I mean once you have merged the Word document, then you want the facility to be able to print to any network or local printer and specifically from a particular bin. For our use, that is the only feature that is missing for which we woild have to open Word. Best Regards Satish.

2

Satish,

Thanks you for your idea.

From what I can tell now it is probably too difficult to implement (to print a Word document so it appears similar to as if it was printed from Word). Reading and writing files in Word format is difficult enough, but actually trying to render pages to a printer or to the screen is probably beyong capabilities of Aspose for the near future because this task can be somewhat compared to developing almost all of the actual MS Word application from the ground up.

There might be reasonable workarounds however. These are just few ideas, they might not work, there must be more ideas out there:

1. WordViewer is a free application from Microsoft to view and hopefull (I’m not sure) print Word document. There might be a way to invoke this application from the command line to print a document. Similarly, there might be a way to invoke standard MS Windows WordPad application to print a document from a command line.

2. Aspose.Word is designed and built so it will be able to output not only in Word format, but basically in any well known format if required, this could include RTF, HTML, XSL-FO, whatever. That means if you have some program or utility that can print, it can almost certainly can be hooked up to receive output of Aspose.Word and print it.

We at Aspose will keep thinking if it is feasible to implement printing in our components.


3

Would it make sense to just launch Word from the Web or Windows app?

If the application is going to create a Word doc, then it would seem that the document is targeted for a user with MS Word.

So, if the document is targeted for a user with Word, then launching the document in Word from either the Website or the Windows app, would provide the user with the ability to print the document from Word.

If just a generic reporting/printing mechanism is required, there are number of solutions out there, including Crystal Reports, included in .net.

Best Regards,
Michael Minadeo
IBM Global Services
Nissan Account