PRB: Setting FontTransparent Has No Effect on Windows 95

• Microsoft Visual Basic Control Creation, Learning, Professional and Enterprise editions for Windows, version 5.0
• Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Editions of Microsoft Visual Basic, 16-bit and 32-bit, for Windows, version 4.0

SYMPTOMS

When printing under Windows 95, the FontTransparent property of the Printer object fails to change the way that the text is printed on the background. The FontTransparent property determines whether background text and graphics are displayed in the spaces around and within characters. The Visual Basic default for this property is True, meaning that the background will display in the spaces around the text. Under Windows 95, the text will print as if FontTransparent is set to False, even though it is set to True.

Additionally, whenever a NewPage method is issued, all text on the new page will print as if FontTransparent is set to False even if it was printing correctly on the previous page.

CAUSE

The background mix mode, which directly relates to the Visual Basic FontTransparent property, and several other attributes of the printer device context, are modified at the start of a page by Windows 95. This is a change in behavior from Windows NT and previous versions of Windows that is not addressed properly by the Visual Basic Printer Object. The problem should only affect the 32-bit version of Visual Basic, although some cases of the 16-bit version exhibiting this behavior have been reported. For more information on the cause, please see the following article(s) in the Microsoft Windows SDK Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q125696
   TITLE     : StartPage/EndPage Resets Printer DC Attributes in Windows 95

RESOLUTION

To work around the problem, call the SetBKMode Windows API function to set the background mix mode. An example is shown in the More Information section below.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION

The code to duplicate the problem is as follows:

1. Start Visual Basic. From the File menu, choose New Project (ALT, F, N). Form1 is created by default.

2. In the click event of the form, add the following code:

      Private Sub Form_Click()
   
         Printer.Line (0, 0)-(Printer.Width, Printer.Height), &HC0C0C0, BF
         Printer.CurrentX = 0
         Printer.CurrentY = 0
         Printer.FontTransparent = True
         Printer.Print "Printer.FontTransparent = " & Printer.FontTransparent
         Printer.FontTransparent = False
         Printer.Print "Printer.FontTransparent = " & Printer.FontTransparent
         Printer.EndDoc
   
      End Sub
   
   

3. From the Run menu, choose start (ALT, R, S), or press the F5 key to run the program.

4. Click the form. The result should be a gray page with one line of black text in the upper left corner and another line of black text in a white box beneath the first. On Windows 95, this will yield a gray page with a white box and black text for both lines.