Am I correct in understanding that vector printing in SilverLight 5 will only work with a Postscript printer?

Question

I had read some blogs about SilverLight 5 and find it hard to believe what I read!

That even on Windows, SilverLight 5 will only do vector (high quality) printing to a postscript printer.

(Also happened to XML Paper becoming the format that all print drivers understood on windows…)

Answer 1

I found Silverlight 5: Vector and Bitmap Printing for Reports and more to be quite helpful regarding PostScript printing in Silverlight 5.

In particular:

If your content or your printer doesn't support PostScript printing, Silverlight automatically falls back to sending an uncompressed bitmap to the printer. If your printer doesn't support PostScript, you'll see the effect of opacity in the printed results (some items lighter colored than others, for example) as the fallback bitmap mode supports opacity.

I take it that Silverlight 5 will still print to PCL printers but there may be a degradation in quality.

Answer 2

As an additional note, I ran into some issues where a printer had an incompatible PostScript driver, or a driver with PostScript emulation. In this case they were printing out garbled PDFs. I was able to come up with a solution to force bitmap printing in Silverlight 5 by using a PrintDocument and handling the PrintPage event.

If you are having garbling/printing issues in Silverlight 5, this thread may be helpful: Silverlight 5 printing garbled Reports