Joan, I think the achilles heel of Flex is it's lack of support for quality printing, client-side. I know there are server-side solutions (at a significant cost) plus a few 3rd party projects kicking around, but getting quality printout from Flex involves jumping through hoops and server-side support. Exactly how Adobe thinks Air apps are going to support quality printing I really don't know.
I think the existing Flex/Flash print processing via rasterisation of components is entirely inadequate for a product aimed at professional application development. Most of the applications I have produced can live with fairly basic printing facilities - setting a header and footer and having some kind of control of pagination. What I really do need though is crisp lines and text and to know that 14pt text is going to appear on the page as 14pt text. I've recently written an application to replace something prototyped using Access and the printing is embarassing in comparison. I would gladly pay to have a client-side printing module that can produce simple reports straight to PDF or the users printer without the need for server-side support. I think the lack of such a facility will always be a problem for serious application developers - we aren't just printing to get screenshots of a web page anymore. Where should I post this request? Paul PS the nearest thing I can find to support client side printing is FlexReport - http://flexreport.riaforge.org/ (haven't had time to check it out yet) ----- Original Message ----- From: Joan Lafferty To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 5:50 PM Subject: [flexcoders] Flex Feedback for the Future As we close up Flex 3 development, the team is evaluating existing Flex feedback to figure out what bugs to fix and features to add for the future. If you could briefly list some of the key enhancements or bug fixes that you would like in the future, please send them along. Also, be sure to vote on deferred bugs and feature requests in the public bugbase as we will be evaluating those too. http://bugs.adobe.com/flex Thanks, Joan Lafferty Flex SDK QA
