Replacing the Print Dialog

Qt provides rich text using a subset of HTML. The QSimpleRichText class makes rich-text printing simple. All we need to do is create a string with the proper format tags inserted at the appropriate places. For our example, we will keep the printing output similar to previous versions.

First, we create the format tags that we will use.

        const QString prelabel  = QString::fromLatin1( "<b>Subject: " );
        const QString postlabel = QString::fromLatin1( "</b>" );
        const QString prepage   = QString::fromLatin1( "<p>" );
        const QString postpage  = QString::fromLatin1( "</p>" );
        const QString pagebreak = QString::fromLatin1( "<hr>" );

Next we just loop over all pages, appending the page label, contents and formatting characters to a printtext variable (which is a QString).

        QString printtext;
        for( int i = 0 ; i <= maxpages ; i++ ) {
            if ( pages[i]->label ) {
                printtext += prelabel;
                printtext += QString::fromLocal8Bit( pages[i]->label );
                printtext += postlabel;
            }

            printtext += prepage;
            printtext += QString::fromLocal8Bit( pages[i]->page );
            printtext += postpage;

            if ( i != maxpages )
                printtext += pagebreak;
        }

The rest of the MainWindow::filePrint() function is the actual printing code. Here we simply create a QSimpleRichText object using the string we created above, and draw this string on the QPrinter object using QPainter.

        QPaintDeviceMetrics metrics( p.device() );
        int dpiy = metrics.logicalDpiY();
        int margin = (int) ( (2/2.54)*dpiy ); // 2 cm margins
        QRect body( margin, margin, metrics.width() - 2*margin,
                    metrics.height() - 2*margin );

        QFont font( font() );
        font.setPointSize( 10 ); // we define 10pt to be a nice base size for printing

        QSimpleRichText richText( printtext, font, QString::null, 0, 0, body.height() );
        richText.setWidth( &p, body.width() );
        QRect view( body );
        int page = 1;
        do {
            qApp->eventLoop()->processEvents( QEventLoop::ExcludeUserInput );

            richText.draw( &p, body.left(), body.top(), view, colorGroup() );
            view.moveBy( 0, body.height() );
            p.translate( 0 , -body.height() );
            p.setFont( font );

            QString pageString = QString::number( page );
            p.drawText( view.right() - p.fontMetrics().width( pageString ),
                        view.bottom() + p.fontMetrics().ascent() + 5, pageString );
            if ( view.top()  >= richText.height() )
                break;
            printer.newPage();
            page++;
        } while (TRUE);

        qApp->restoreOverrideCursor();
    }

Removing the Dependency on Xt/Motif

    #include "pageeditdialog.h"
    #include "page.h"

    #include <qapplication.h>
    #include <qeventloop.h>
    #include <qfiledialog.h>
    #include <qlineedit.h>
    #include <qmessagebox.h>
    #include <qpainter.h>
    #include <qpaintdevicemetrics.h>
    #include <qprinter.h>
    #include <qsimplerichtext.h>
    #include <qstatusbar.h>

    #include <unistd.h>