Real printing plugin?

Tue Mar 12 00:48:01 UTC 2002

Hello Richard

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> I _have_ to be able to print them so that students can have printed
> copies of at least some "slides".

At the moment I do not use BookMorphs for doing presentations. 
I instead use projects. Each project corresponds to one slide.

For a presentation I once used GIF-file export wrapped in a html file
like this.

| fout s t |

aNextFileNameString _ 'theFileNameOfTheNextSlide.html'.

fout _ Project current changeSet name.
s _ '<html><body><a href=', 
    $" asString, 
    aNextFileNameString, 
    $" asString, 
    '><img src=', 
    $" asString, 
    fout, 
    '.gif', 
    $" asString, 
    '></a></body></html>'.
t _ StandardFileStream fileNamed: (fout, '.html').
t nextPutAll: s.
t close.

GIFReadWriter
   putForm: (Display
   contentsOfArea: (Rectangle origin: 0 @ 0 extent: 730 @ 530))
   onFileNamed: (fout, '.gif').

I put the script above into a class method I called from the personal menu
from the desktop. It had to be done individually for each project
('slide') which seems to be a bit clumsy but in fact I was rather quick 
in producing the result.

The html wrapping made the enclosed gif file a link to the next html file
so it was easy to go on. For going backwards I just used the standard
navigation bar of the web browser. A enhancement would be to put the
name of the project as well into html file between the title tags so that
the history of the web browser has good entries.

I'm aware of the fact that this solution is rather simple, but it works
fine.

For doing an output of a sequence of slides you could use the code Bob
Arning published on this list as an answer to a question of mine.

I put his answer on http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2358

I use this code together with some html/css output code I wrote to do the
export at the moment. However the html/css output only works for just the
most common morphs I'm using at the moment. Probably a good idea would be
to use the gif-output for the other morphs as a fall back; but I didn't do
that yet. In fact is seems to be easy to implement in a class hierarchy:
just some one or two methods.

However the code given above works fine if you just have to do some slides
and you even can hand them out electronically for displaying platform
independently in a tool every student has.

On the other side: Why not give the students just your image file?
I consider that to be a great solution. 
You can have various projects - jump to project buttons - workspaces with
code snippets - browsers already open at the right spot - 
ImageMorphs with figures - you basically end up having a CBT based 
"programming workshop".

Put all these images on a CD, and then copy it two or three times
and have the students handle the rest of the copying to their laptops
themselves. 

Third solution: Do an eps export and include the eps files in MS Word to
do the print-out. This has the additional advantage that the graphics can
be scaled.

Cheers
Hannes Hirzel

P.S. 

There is definitly room for improvement.

1) Direct printing support in Windows and Unix as well.
2) Some configured images that could act like a Powerpnt viewer (3MB 
   download). I actuall did this for the newest 3.3a. The resulting image
   file size (compressed without sources, changes and VM) is in this
   range. I will publish the results as a "Case Study" on the Swiki.
3) Better HTML/CSS export
4) PDF export