Banding, Printing, and the Number of Bands

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows versions 3.0 and 3.1

SUMMARY

Banding is a printing technique used to print full-page graphics on raster devices such as dot-matrix printers. In banding, an application prints an image by dividing the image into several bands (or slices) and sending each band to the printer separately.

To properly implement banding, an application should never make assumptions about the number, size, or the ordering of bands that will be provided by a printer driver. Making assumptions can cause problems because these values can vary depending on the amount of free memory that is available and the printer driver that is being used. The correct method for determining the size and the starting position of bands is to call the escape function NEXTBAND. This escape function takes as a parameter a LPRECT, which points to a data structure that will receive the coordinates of the next band. The NEXTBAND escape function sets the band rectangle to the empty rectangle when printing reaches the end of the page.

For more information on the NEXTBAND escape function, see pages 12-39 and 12-40 of the Microsoft Windows SDK "Reference Volume 2" or page 489 of the Windows SDK "Programmer's Reference, Volume 3: Messages, Structures, and Macros" manual for version 3.1.