Description

The print preview components consist of three visual components for low level print and print preview on the Windows target platform.

• TPrintPreview
  This control acts as a printer replacement to generate, display, manipulate, and print pages.

  

• TThumbnailPreview
  This control shows the list of pages generated by a TPrintPreview component as thumbnails.

  

• TPaperPreview
  This control represents a sheet of paper that an application can draw directly on its canvas.

  

All the print preview components are fully customizable and have a comprehensive set of properties and events.

Installation

Add the following file into a new or existing package:

• Preview.pas

The following packages must be added to the requires clause of your package:

• VCL
• RTL (for Delphi 6 or higher only)
• DesignIDE (for design-time package of Delphi 6 or higher only)

Ensure Preview.pas and DELPHIAREA.INC files are in the search path of your Delphi installation.

PDF Support

The TPrintPreview control relies on third-party libraries for saving pages as PDF document. Currently, the control can use two libraries for this purpose.

Synopse PDF Engine

Synopse PDF engine is an open source PDF document creation library for Delphi. You can find the source code of the library at https://github.com/synopse/SynPDF.

To instruct the TPrintPreview control to use this library as the PDF generator, define the SYNOPSE compiler directive at the beginning of the Preview.pas file.

dsPDF Library

The dsPDF library is a postcard-ware. To get the non-demo version of this library, you should send the author (Grega Loboda) a postcard of the town or city you live.

The demo version of the library is provided in the Examples\General folder of this repository. The demo version displays "This is demo" message upon initialization, and does not save document's properties.