A Little About Printing

LabVIEW has several kinds of printing you can use when you want to make a hard copy of your work:

• You can use the Print Window option from the File menu to make a quick printout of the contents of the current window.

• You can make a comprehensive, custom printout of a VI, including information about the front panel, block diagram, subVls, controls, VI history, and so on, by selecting the Print . . . option from the File menu. Choosing this option takes you through a print wizard where you can specify the format you want. You have the option of not only printing a hard copy, but printing to HTML and RTF files as well.

• You can use the LabVIEW programmatic printing features to make VI front panels print under the control of your application. Select Print at Completion from the Operate menu to enable programmatic printing. LabVIEW will then print the contents of the front panel any time the VI finishes executing. If the VI is a subVI, LabVIEW prints when that subVI finishes, before returning to the caller. We'll also talk more about this option in Chapter 14.

• You can have LabVIEW generate custom reports for you as RTF files or HTML files (and even Microsoft Word and Excel reports, with an add-on toolkit from NI). These reports can be printed and can include images and graphs as well as text. We'll look at Report Generation in LabVIEW in more detail in Chapter 16, "Connectivity in LabVIEW."