OpenEuphoria

1. is there a "transparent" printer background color?

• Posted by DanM Jan 27, 2009
• 925 views

I've run into a slight problem trying to stretchBlt a virtual screen over to a printer. I'm trying to do that because I already have a virtual screen, in order to allow scrolling, (though I'm not 100% sure I even needed to do that), and I figured it'd be easier to stretchBlt that VirtScrn than to generalize my display routine to accomodate printing as well as video viewing.

The problem is that I started out with a buttonFace color for the VirtScrn, and then used that to CLEAR the VirtScrn as needed, which is no problem on the video display, but now involves a BACKGROUND COLOR on the printer after stretchBlt, and I don't want to waste ink printing a background color where it's not needed.

So, I made the background color of the VirtScrn WHITE (16777215).
ie, setWindowBackColor( VirtScrn,16777215)
(That's the color the color-picker dialog set for picking white)

But I don't really know if that color is a "no-color" transparent white to the printer, or not, such that the printer might still be using various colors to make that "white" background.

(btw, I'm not really printing things out yet, as I'm nearly out of ink, so I just use the built-in facility to "preview" a print job instead.)

So how could I know what color to specify for the background of a virtual window that would NOT print as a color on the printer when stretchBlt'd, but WOULD clear the VirtScrn when set as background?

Dan