All content of a PrintDocument is represented by render objects. A rich hierarchy of render objects  is provided by the RenderObject class to represent different types of content.

The table below provides a hierarchy of render object types, with a brief description for each class (note that italics indicate abstract classes):

Add Render Objects

The visible content of a PrintDocument is represented by a tree of render objects with the root of the tree being the Body of the document. You can add a render object to the Children collection of the document's Body, or to the Children collection of another object already in the hierarchy.

C1PrintDocument doc = new C1PrintDocument();
RenderText rt = new RenderText();
rt.Text = "This is a text.";
doc.Body.Children.Add(rt);

So, the document's Body.Children collection contains all high-level render objects of the document. Moreover, each render object has a Children collection, which contains render objects within it, and so on. (This is quite similar to the Windows Forms' controls that can be nested inside each other. Any control has the collection of contained controls, and so on.)

In addition to the document's body, there are two other regions where you can add render objects in a document, the page header and footer, which are accessible via the PageHeader and PageFooter properties.

Render Areas

Although any render object can contain other render objects as its children, there is one render object designed specifically as a container for other objects, called the RenderArea. The primary difference between a render area and other render objects (such a render text) is that for a render area, specifying either of its width or height as Auto means that the corresponding dimension is determined by the size of the children, while for other types of objects, auto size is determined by the object's own content (text size for a RenderText, image size for a RenderImage, and so on).

By default, when a new render area is created, its Width is equal to the width of its parent (so a top-level render area stretches across the whole page - or across the current column for multi-column layouts). The Height of a render area, on the other hand, is by default set to Auto (Unit.Auto), and is determined by the combined height of the render area's children. So the default behavior of a top-level render area is to take up the whole page width, and stretch down as needed (possibly spanning multiple pages) to accommodate all its content. You can set the Width of a render area to auto (Unit.Auto), in which case it will adjust to accommodate the combined widths of the area's children. In this case, if the combined width of the area's children exceeds the width of the page, horizontal page breaks will occur, adding extension pages to the right of the current page. To prevent horizontal page breaks (clipping the area on the right if necessary), set the area's CanSplitHorz property to False (it is True by default).

Stacking

Within the parent object or document body (that is, the containers), render objects are by default placed according to the stacking rules, determined by the value of the Stacking property of the container (document for top-level objects), which can be one of the following StackingRulesEnum enumeration members:

Stacking rules do not propagate down into the contained objects (children). In other words, if you define a render area and set its stacking to the (non-default) value BlockLeftToRight, and then add another render area inside the first one - its stacking will be the default (BlockTopToBottom) unless you explicitly change it.

You may also use the X and Y properties of a render object to set its position explicitly, which is covered in the next section. Note that in such cases, the render object does not participate in the stacking order at all, so that its position neither affects the positioning of its siblings nor is affected by their positions.

Specify Render Objects' Size and Location

The size and location of a render object are controlled significantly by four properties enumerated below:

• X: specifies the X coordinate of the object.
• Y: specifies the Y coordinate of the object.
• Width: specifies the width of the object.
• Height: specifies the height of the object.

All these properties have the value type C1.C1Preview.Unit. The default value for X and Y is Auto (represented by the static field Unit.Auto), which means that the object is positioned according to the stacking rules provided by its parent.

The following table lists the default sizes (width and height) for all render objects, as well as the rules used to calculate auto sizes:

You can override the default values for any of those properties with custom values, and specifying anything but Auto as the value for X or Y coordinates excludes the object from the stacking flow. The size and location properties can be set as absolute values, percentage of parent's size, functions ( such as Min and Max).

Render Objects Shadows

PrintDocument provides support for shadows cast by render objects. For this, the API provides the IShadow interface. By default, the shadow is invisible due to being 100% transparent. To show the shadow. transparency value needs to be set less than 100. Other properties can be adjusted as needed.

The IShadow interface includes the following sub-properties:

The following sample code defines a shadow on a render object:

C1PrintDocument doc = new C1PrintDocument();
RenderText rt = new RenderText("Sample Shadow");
rt.Width = Unit.Auto;
rt.Style.Shadow.Transparency = 20;
rt.Style.Shadow.Color = Color.BurlyWood;
doc.Body.Children.Add(rt);

Note that while you do not need to create a Shadow object when setting shadow properties, you may choose to do so, for example, like this:

C1PrintDocument doc = new C1PrintDocument();
RenderText rt = new RenderText("Sample Shadow");
rt.Width = Unit.Auto;
rt.Style.Shadow = new Shadow(20, 100, "1mm", 45, Color.CadetBlue);
doc.Body.Children.Add(rt);
documentViewer.Document = doc.FixedDocumentSequence;

Borders

Borders can be centered over an object's bounds, without affecting either the object's size or the surrounding objects' positions. The BordersModeEnum specifies the various modes of accounting for border thickness when laying out the objects in a document.

The BordersModeEnum provides the following options:

• Default: The whole border is considered to be part of the object. This is the default behavior of objects in C1PrintDocument.
• C1Report: The inner half of border thickness is considered to be part of the object, the outer half of border is considered to be outside of the object's space. This is the default behavior of objects in C1Report (same as in MS Access).
• Rdl: Border thickness is not taking into account at all when calculating objects' sizes and layout. Borders are drawn centered on objects' bounds.