Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> 
>>I think in Squeak we should stick to the PostScript convention, 72 
>>points per inch. The platform plugin can then figure out what to do.
> 
> 
> Only if we use floats. There are plenty of situations in which you want to
> be able to print at higher resolutions (do I need to remind you that we have
> 200dpi screens these days?) so sticking to 72 is only going to work with
> fractional measures. Mind you I am not really interested to use PJP only for
> printing forms or EPS in the long term - I want to use it for some more
> general things and 72 dpi is simply not enough granularity on a printer.

Of course. I was thinking floats, but fixed point integers could do 
nicely, too (perhaps 16.16? That would give as +-100 meters range with 
better than micrometer resolution). It's just that I think giving people 
a fixed reference is important, and reusing the PS definition is better 
than inventing our own.

>>>I would _really_ want to have this. If nothing else, you 
>>>could report a pseudo page size up to the ST side and then
>>>use this as a basis for any further operations.
>>
>>How about parsing PPDs? Should be easy enough to construct a 
>>Squeak UI from them.
> 
> 
> What's a PPD?

A PostScript Printer Description file. This is the x-platform standard 
for accessing special features of printers. It basically contains a UI 
spec, constraints for enabling options, and PostScript snippets to be 
inserted in a PS file depending on which options were chosen. The spec 
is here:

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5003.PPD_Spec_v4.3.pdf

It's used on MacOS X and Linux (via CUPS, Common UNIX Printing System), 
and on Windows if you use Adobe's PostScript printer driver.

-- Bert