> John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:
> 
> >I'm wondering if there is any interest in printing from Squeak on the 
> >mac. It seem Apple has made it a wee bit more friendly to print 
> >either a bitmap/form or dump postscript into a print stream.

I'm glad to here a VM implementer asking this question.

YES, being able to print directly without going through EPS export
and opening another program and printing from there would be great!!
Of course EPS is very helpful in producing high quality results.

But a direct command to print a Morph's form's bitmap would be a valuable
addition. 

In a certain way it should not be difficult to feed a bitmap/form to a
printer directly. I imagine that the printer API has calls for this. But
if one looks at the details things normally get more complicated. There
obviously have been obstacles that hindered the VM implementers to do
this so far but now John sees a possibility to come up with this.

Or on a more ambitious approach one could use the postscript framework
(developed and implemented by Marcel Weiher and others in 1999) to use
other printer languages like the one from HP
http://www.oreilly.com/reference/dictionary/terms/P/Printer_Command_Language.htm

and

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/printers/support_doc/bpl04568.html#P2_177

However the straightforward and simple approach of just sending a bitmap
to the printer is a big step forward from the user point of view given the
high-speed of the computers and the links to the printers nowadays.

Under Linux one could probably easily feed the output of Marcel Weiher's
postscript framework to the system printing  queue.

Coming up with a solution which works reasonably at on the
major platforms is probably the challenge.


Regards
Hannes Hirzel