HOWTO: How to Change Default Printer Settings in an MFC Application

MORE INFORMATION

Default printer driver settings in an MFC application are maintained in the CWinApp object. These settings take the form of the following two protected member variables:

• m_hDevMode, which is a handle to a global memory object that contains a DEVMODE structure.
• m_hDevNames, which is a handle to a global memory object that contains a DEVNAMES structure.

These variables are initialized to NULL by MFC when the application starts. The first time a print operation is invoked, the global default printer settings are retrieved in these variables. All subsequent print operations in the application will take their printer settings from these variables.

To set an application's default printer settings to something different from the system defaults, the application must retrieve the system defaults before a print operation and modify the values in the appropriate member variable in the CWinApp derived object. To retrieve the system defaults, you can use the CWinApp::GetPrinterDeviceDefaults() function.

Sample Code

For example, if you want to set the orientation in your application to landscape mode, you could use a function similar to the following where CMyWinApp is a class derived from the CWinApp class:

void CMyWinApp::SetLandscape()
    {
    // Get default printer settings.
    PRINTDLG   pd;

    pd.lStructSize = (DWORD) sizeof(PRINTDLG);
    if (GetPrinterDeviceDefaults(&pd))
        {
        // Lock memory handle.
        DEVMODE FAR* pDevMode =
            (DEVMODE FAR*)::GlobalLock(m_hDevMode);
        LPDEVNAMES lpDevNames;
        LPTSTR lpszDriverName, lpszDeviceName, lpszPortName;
        HANDLE hPrinter;


        if (pDevMode)
            {
            // Change printer settings in here.
            pDevMode->dmOrientation = DMORIENT_LANDSCAPE;
           // Unlock memory handle.
       lpDevNames = (LPDEVNAMES)GlobalLock(pd.hDevNames);
       lpszDriverName = (LPTSTR )lpDevNames + lpDevNames->wDriverOffset;
       lpszDeviceName = (LPTSTR )lpDevNames + lpDevNames->wDeviceOffset;
       lpszPortName   = (LPTSTR )lpDevNames + lpDevNames->wOutputOffset;

       ::OpenPrinter(lpszDeviceName, &hPrinter, NULL);
       ::DocumentProperties(NULL,hPrinter,lpszDeviceName,pDevMode,
                           pDevMode, DM_IN_BUFFER|DM_OUT_BUFFER);

       // Sync the pDevMode.
       // See SDK help for DocumentProperties for more info.
       ::ClosePrinter(hPrinter);
       ::GlobalUnlock(m_hDevNames);
       ::GlobalUnlock(m_hDevMode);
       }
    }
}
				

If you want landscape to be the default orientation for the application, you would call this function before any print job was invoked. A good place to do this would be in your CWinApp derived class's InitInstance() function.