How to design and print a custom 'application form paper' in WPF?

Question

It's actually a physical paper - an "insurance form" - in which the insurance customer fills in their information. So far the customer had to write all the asked information in the blank fields on the paper, using a pen of course. But I decided to develop an application in WPF by which the insurance company agent can easily "type" the desired information and then print them on the same "insurance form".

So I need to create a blank A4 page and put a number of 'text boxes' on specific places on the page. Let the user to adjust the size and the position of them on the page and fill in some text. Then print the page.

The question is, how do I do so ? I have no idea that what kinda tool in C# .NET and WPF there is that I can use. System.Drawing maybe ?

Answer 1

Using Visual Studio, you would create a new WPF application, add a new UserControl to the project and inside (the XAML of) that UserControl in the visual studio designer you would then add a root layout panel like StackPanel or Grid and on that panel you would add your Labels and TextBoxes (CheckBox, RadioButton etc.) that the user needs to fill out.

You would then place that UserControl into your main window (probaly inside a ScrollViewer because the whole page might not fit on the screen) together with a print button or menu entry.

You can then easily print out that whole UserControl using PrintVisual in the click eventhandler of the button. You should be done pretty quickly if that is all what you need.

As an additional step you could go and style your controls and labels so that the look more like your paper form.

Answer 2

The question is how your form looks. If you expect something designed - use ordinary objects create new window, and print the window without showing . Somthing like:

var window = new YourWindow();

window.Show();

PrintDialog pd = new PrintDialog();

pd.PrintVisual(window,"MyForm");

window.Close();

Expand, google How to print wpf window

If you need more paged document (such as a Word document) you can use RichTextBlock. It has classes that allow you to layout. And then print it as any window, or you can print directly from RichTextBlock.

I have an app that does something similar, for me it's even more complicated, because the printed form changes frequently.

What I do is get the document as a Word, converts it to XAML using the codeplex word add-in, Makes some changes and so produces forms easily.