printing quality winform

Question

I have 2 problems while trying to print from a WinForms application. The first is a very very bad quality no matter what I try. The second is that I have a big page margin from the top left corner and the winform is cutting. Any ideas? This is my code:

Bitmap MemoryImage;
    public void GetPrintArea(Panel pnl)
    {
        MemoryImage = new Bitmap(pnl.Width, pnl.Height);
        Rectangle rect = new Rectangle(0, 0, pnl.Width, pnl.Height);
        pnl.DrawToBitmap(MemoryImage, new Rectangle(0, 0, pnl.Width, pnl.Height));
    }
    protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
    {
        if (MemoryImage != null)
        {
            e.Graphics.DrawImage(MemoryImage, 0, 0);
            base.OnPaint(e);
        }
    }
    void printdoc1_PrintPage(object sender, PrintPageEventArgs e)
    {
        e.Graphics.SmoothingMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.SmoothingMode.HighQuality;
        e.Graphics.InterpolationMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.InterpolationMode.HighQualityBilinear;
        e.Graphics.PixelOffsetMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.PixelOffsetMode.HighQuality;
        Rectangle pagearea = e.PageBounds;
        e.Graphics.DrawImage(MemoryImage, (pagearea.Width / 2) - (this.panel1.Width / 2), this.panel1.Location.Y);

    }
    public void Print(Panel pnl)
    {
        panel1 = pnl;
        GetPrintArea(pnl);
        printPreviewDialog1.Document = printdoc1;
        printPreviewDialog1.ShowDialog();
    }
    private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Print(this.panel1);
    }

Answer 1

This comes up over and over again. There just is no magic solution, although eventually the problem is likely to disappear. The emergence of "retina" displays is pivotal.

The core issue is that monitors have a resolution that's drastically worse than printers. A typical printer has a resolution of 600 dots per inch. Which makes it capable of printing 6600 x 5100 individual pixels on a piece of paper. Much, much more than what a monitor can display, a full HD monitor tops out at 1920 x 1080 pixels. Roughly a factor of 5 worse, give or take.

This works out poorly when you print what shows up on a monitor on a piece of paper and try to keep it the same size. Inevitably, because of the lack of pixels on the monitor, each one pixel from the monitor is printed as a 5x5 blob on paper. If you try to keep the pixel mapping one-to-one, you will get a razor-sharp copy on paper. But it has turned into a postage-stamp.

Inevitably, the printout looks very grainy due those pixel blobs. What looks especially poor is text. Operating systems use lots of tricks to make text look good on monitors with poor resolution. Anti-aliasing is standard, tricks like ClearType were designed to take advantage of monitor physics that can help increase the perceived resolution. This no longer works when the text is printed, those anti-aliasing pixels turn into blobs and become very visible, completely ruining the effect. Especially bad for ClearType text on a color printer, the red and blue color fringes now can be clearly seen.

The only decent approach is to render to a printer using the actual resolution and not the monitor resolution. Like using the PrintDocument class in .NET. Using a report generator can help avoid having to write the code for it.