PrintPreviewDialog Control Overview (Windows Forms)

The Windows Forms PrintPreviewDialog control is a pre-configured dialog box used to display how a PrintDocument will appear when printed. Use it within your Windows-based application as a simple solution instead of configuring your own dialog box. The control contains buttons for printing, zooming in, displaying one or multiple pages, and closing the dialog box.

Key Properties and Methods

The control's key property is Document, which sets the document to be previewed. The document must be a PrintDocument object. In order to display the dialog box, you must call its ShowDialog method. Anti-aliasing can make the text appear smoother, but it can also make the display slower; to use it, set the UseAntiAlias property to true.

Certain properties are available through the PrintPreviewControl that the PrintPreviewDialog contains. (You do not have to add this PrintPreviewControl to the form; it is automatically contained within the PrintPreviewDialog when you add the dialog to your form.) Examples of properties available through the PrintPreviewControl are the Columns and Rows properties, which determine the number of pages displayed horizontally and vertically on the control. You can access the Columns property as PrintPreviewDialog1.PrintPreviewControl.Columns in Visual Basic, printPreviewDialog1.PrintPreviewControl.Columns in Visual C#, or printPreviewDialog1->PrintPreviewControl->Columns in Visual C++.

See Also

Reference

PrintPreviewControl Control Overview (Windows Forms)
PrintPreviewDialog Class

Other Resources

PrintPreviewDialog Control (Windows Forms)
Dialog-Box Controls and Components (Windows Forms)