Address Label Printing API for Windows / News: Recent posts

I have just received a mail shot from a client who is using a bespoke package (written by yours truly) to manage their mailing list.
The address label api is a component of their solution.
The letter arrived today with a very tidy address label stuck on the envelope.
Its particularly nice to receive; the client had tried using a printing company to mass produce printed envelopes (and they had made a real mess of the address data).
Pete

I thought it was about time I stress tested this little API.

I used a modified demo app; no printer dialog... several thousand labels added to a label set and sent directly to a print preview dialog.

Test machine

Sempron 2800/1Gbyte/XP Home SP2
Label type; L7163
Run under VC# Studio 2005 in debug

Here are the results;

Test 1) 10,000 Labels

Time to Complete; <10 seconds
Virtual Memory Utilisation; 30Mb... read more

...you need the ability to reprint page ranges.
So I've modified the code to allow you to set page ranges in the common print dialog.
You only need to reprint the sheet that's been chewed up.
Pete.

... on an overloaded underspecified old laptop running XP.
Estimating start/stop time conservatively.
Pete

Its always a bit nerve wracking when a piece of code starts to get pushed beyond the limits of your own tests. This API was tested with around 50 odd labels.
I have a client application using this API in anger, with around 200 addresses to print. Currently the number of addresses is growing at around 20 a day, so the number of labels grows too.
Thankfully, currently the label printing API functionality is working fine. No performance issues so far.
I'd guess with very very large label sets you might run into memory problems (the set of addresses being held in memory before the labels are printed).
I guess you could mitigate any such issues by generating labels in batches perhaps?
Still, touch wood, not a problem yet.
I'd be very interested to know what numbers of labels other people are reaching...
Pete.

Hi.
I've uploaded an archive with the first release of code. You can find it on the project download page.
I plan to put the source code into CVS/SVN shortly, so it can be tracked more formally, but for the moment I thought it was more important to offer some capability.
I hope this works as well for you as it did and does for me, and look forward to your feedback.
Pete