PDA - Printing guide
April 11th, 2007 by admin
For an enthusiastic developer having a Pocket Pc on his hand may be a dream come true. If you decide to start creating some cool application and you want to print a document then you may find yourself in a bit of a trouble.
You might think a Pocket PC 2003 or a Windows Mobile 2005 operating system will provide you with the right tools for printing, or you might thing that if you are using a top of the line development environment like Visual Studio 2005 then printing is at your fingertips.
You can never be further from the truth. Printing on a PDA, a Pocket Pc for that matter is really a problem. THERE IS NO DEFAULT PRINTING implemented on these operating systems.
So, if you decide to print a Pocket Word/Excel file or an html files then you are in for a big surprise. When Microsoft decided to create their OS they never though of the possibility that PDA-s will become so powerful and useful so they never did implemented this possibility (or they didn’t want to).
There are still solutions to overcome this. What you have to do is use a third party solution. If you want to use a .NET solution you are in luck. You can find two cool SDK for this job.
The first one is Print Pocket CE and the second solution would be Print Boy. They are software solutions that you can install on your PDA or you can choose to integrate them in your software. There is nothing free for you at this point. Hewlett Packard started to develop a free SDK for developers but they soon decided to stop the project.
Choosing the right printer is again a big problem. You can only use an Ink Jet Printer or a Laser Printer and the connectivity is basically reduced to Bluetooth/IRDA/or network printer. You can also try to use a print server but your mobility will be drastically decreased by doing so.
You can of course try to connect a Dot Matrix printer using a cool adapter like this but this becomes more expensive.
A cool situation when a company would want to use this would be : a PDA + Printing device to issue receipts on the fly.
