Printing with Templates (XDEV7411)

Instead of making your simple app support complicated printing, why not use a pre-formatted template instead?

At the REALbasic Developer Conference in Frankfurt at the end of 2008 at least two developers talked to me about how to generate print files. They seemed to think this was something like brewing magic potions in Professor Snapes lessons!

Both developers were surprised to hear that I print several standard letters with my software without experiencing all those problems. But I'll let it out at the beginning: I am cheating.

Instead of worrying about the complexities of formatting styled text and printing it on different platforms, I build new "print" documents from a pre-formatted template file. That way I don't care about the structure or design of that file, or have to code my own printing routine. Instead I just care about placing the new content within the existing template file.

That's easy! Perhaps it's too basic for an article, but since these developers hadn't used this approach, perhaps others out there will benefit from the same technique.