[Solved] Background & Watermark Printing

[udaybhaskar]

Hi Telerik Team,

Can we do background printing and watermark printing using RadRichTextBox with & without UI.
I mean without actually creating the control, by using RadDocument can we load a document or by giving a document/file path can we do printing of that document in the background. In the same way above can we do a watermark printing by setting a watermark text.

Regards,
Uday

[Ivailo Karamanolev]

Hello Udaybhaskar,

As for the watermarks, we currently do not support this feature. It's in our development plans, but I can not give you a specific time frame as it is not scheduled yet. Once we add support for watermarks, they will be printed as to best match what is displayed in RadRichTextBox.
Regarding the printing, the situation is somewhat complicated. You basically have 3 options for printing: native Silverlight, HTML and PDF. If you go for native Silverlight printing, then you will have to add RadRichTextBox to the visual tree, be it only temporary for the printing, as this is a requirement for printing in Silverlight. You can also set the opacity of the RadRichTextBox to 0 so that it doesn't cause disruption in the user experience. On the other hand, HTML and PDF printing do not need any UI in the Silverlight plugin, so they can be executed in the background. Worth noting is that when you use HTML printing, the document may, under certain cases, not exactly match what is displayed in the editor due to limitations in HTML. Also, PDF printing requires that the user has a PDF reader application installed.

Kind regards,
Ivailo
the Telerik team

[udaybhaskar]

Hi Ivailo,

Thanks for the response. I got your point, except for the PDF Printing. I didn't saw PDF Print Mode in any version. I know Silverlight and HTML Print Modes. And as you said HTML printing is not 100% perfect. Please let me know how we can do PDF Print. And you mentioned that for this user should have PDF Reader. Is it the Browser Plugin or Windows Software?

Thanks,
Uday

[Ivailo Karamanolev]

Hi Udaybhaskar,

By PDF printing I mean sending a PDF to the user's browser. Currently, there is no way to do this entirely from Silverlight / client-side. In order to use it, you have to have a server application that sends the PDF to the client with the appropriate content-type (application/pdf). What happens when this is sent depends on the client machine configuration - if there is a PDF reading plugin installed for the browser, it will most probably open inside it with the option to save/print. If there is no plugin, but a reader application installed, the user will be offered to save the file to his computer and be able to further operate on it.
As additional functionality is required for this to work besides what is available in Silverlight, there is no readily implemented PDF printing and the way it works highly depends on your specific application (e.g. will it go through a web-service, a database, etc.)

Regards,
Ivailo
the Telerik team