Real printing plugin?

Marcel Weiher marcel at metaobject.com
Tue Mar 12 09:50:14 UTC 2002


On Tuesday, March 12, 2002, at 04:03 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> Marcel Weiher <marcel at metaobject.com> wrote:
> 	Well, if you have a Postscript printer, Ghostscript or some distiller,
> 	then you've been able to print Morphs for well over 2 years.
> 	
> Hmm.
> Bring up menu,

Which one?  The Postscript support is in the "copy and print" menu.  
This goes on to specify the filename, wether you want portrait or 
landscape.  Done.  As I said, this has been working for well over 2 
years now.  Look for Postscript on the Wiki.

>  "page setup" gives me an Inspector on some object I don't
> know about.  Documentation?  Forget it!  "send contents to printer"
> brings up a window (with a scroll bar on the right) saying
>     ioFormPrint width: 794 height: 1123 depth: 1 &c &c &c

That would be some code other than the Postscript printing stuff, 
because that doesn't mess with 'ioFormPrint..', and doesn't sport a 
'page setup' inspector (although on would be nice!) and isn't accessed 
via 'send contents to printer'.  The Postscript printing support doesn't 
just dump bitmaps, it produces high quality, device-independent graphics 
from morphs (as far as possible...).

> Not encouraging.

Hmm, it would be nice if you checked what exactly it is you are 
criticizing before slamming it...

What is missing from the Postscript support is code for actually sending 
the result straight to a printer.  Again, this would be nice, but I 
think there is little point in doing it right now because directly 
printing a Postscript file probably won't work for most people.

In order to get 'real' printing, we need to feed each of the various 
host OSes with a device independent representation of the Morph that the 
respective system can digest.  For Mac OS X, this would be PDF (or 
corresponding Quartz calls), for Windows, my guess is WMF (or the 
corresponding GDI calls).  For generic Unix, we have to punt and just 
deliver the Postscript, which is nice because we're done already.

So we need to build a special canvas for each of these systems, modelled 
after the Postscript canvas, and then hook that up to the underlying 
printing system.

That would be 'real' printing.

Marcel

--
Marcel Weiher				Metaobject Software Technologies
marcel at metaobject.com		www.metaobject.com
Metaprogramming for the Graphic Arts.   HOM, IDEAs, MetaAd etc.




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