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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