In Enumerating printer forms article the DeviceCapabilities function is used to mark print forms supported by particular printer. It can be used to retrieve other printer capabilities as well.

To distribute applications that use reports with custom paper size you have to create custom printer forms on every destination PC that runs Windows 2000 or later. The MS KB article Q157172 explains how it can be done manually. However there's a way to do that programmatically using Windows API.

Enumerating of printer forms can be done with Windows API EnumForms function. Contrary to what MSDN says, it returns the list of all printer forms on PC, not just for the specific printer. On other hand, DeviceCapabilities can return a list of supported paper sizes for the printer.

The number of jobs in print queue can be retrieved by simplified version of Enumerating jobs in print queue

Enumerating jobs in a print queue can be done with

• WMI Win32_PrintJob class
• Windows API EnumJobs function.

All jobs from a print queue can be deleted with

• WMI Win32_Printer class and CancelAllJobs method
• Windows API SetPrinter function.

The GetDeviceCaps function can be used to retrieve printer-specific information as demonstrated below.

CLEAR
 
#DEFINE LOGPIXELSX    88    && Logical pixels/inch in X         
#DEFINE LOGPIXELSY    90    && Logical pixels/inch in Y         
 
#DEFINE PHYSICALWIDTH   110 && Physical Width in device units   
#DEFINE PHYSICALHEIGHT  111 && Physical Height in device units  
#DEFINE PHYSICALOFFSETX 112 && Physical Printable Area x margin 

Sometimes it's necessary to change Windows default printer from within VFP application. It can be done with Windows API, WSH or WMI.