Thread: Writing data to a Printer Device Context

Hi all,

I have created a character buffer (char buff[]) which contains the data of a word document (the document contains text and images).
i would like to pass this data onto a printer. I have managed to get the handle of the printer using GetPrinterDC. but what i can't figure out is how am i going to pass my buffer data to this DC?
If given the handle of a window, we can find its DC and then pass that data to the printer DC using BitBlt, but in my case i don't have a handle, but only an array of characters which represent some image.
Can somone suggest a method?

I think the easiest way to print the word document, is to use the Com objects for Word.
If you want to print the document directly to the printer DC, you first have to interpret the document, and then format the text and graphics for the dc..

hi knutso,

I wouldn't like to stick to just MS-word douments. basically, my buffer will contain binary data of any image or text document. The data could be an .swf format, or some vector diagram etc. i would then send this data to a postscript printer which will generate a .ps file. using a ps2pdf converter i can then recover whatever image is there in a pdf file.
One way to passing any image to a printer is by using the BitBlt function( we can print text using TextOut, ellipse by using the Ellipse() function etc.)
But BitBlt requires a DC of a window that contains an image. I have succesfully printed the image of the desktop on a .pdf file but when it comes to data enclosed in a character string I don't know how to print it.