printing (was: couple of questions)

[Graham Samuel]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 22:39:53 -0800 (PST), Jan Schenkel 
<janschenkel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>--- Alex Rice <alrice at ARCplanning.com> wrote:
[..]

>Does
>  > anyone have sample
>>  code they could share, or have posted in the past to
>>  this list, which
>>  shows how to do this non-trivial kind of printing.
>>  Especially the paper
>>  size and pagination?
>>
>
>Hi Alex,
>
>RunRev 2.0 will have much better printing options,
>especially for reports.
>
>In the meantime, you could take a look at the
>'printPaperSize', 'printMargins' , 'printGutters', and
>a few more 'printXXX' properties.
>Then get the height of your stack, and you should be
>able to determine where the page breaks are going to
>end up, and 'create' or 'clone' a field on the correct
>card with the pagenumber in it.

I echo Alex's original query. I have not yet discovered a good 
example of a comprehensive printing script.

One thing I've discovered is that, taken together, the description of 
the 'printPaperSize' global property and the 'answer printer' command 
in the Transcript Dictionary are misleading, since it appears from 
the 'printPaperSize' example that you can **set** the property by 
script, but doesn't mention that you can also find out the values 
**the user has set it to** via a 'Page Setup' dialog ('answer 
printer') - AFAIK this is the only way to determine what the user has 
asked for in terms of paper size and portrait/landscape choice.

I have not yet tried to understand the report generating in 2.0, and 
I don't know if it tries to do more with the printer driver API 
elements that are common across platforms. In particular, I don't 
know if it will be possible to find out the maximum printable area 
(minimum margins) on a page, which certainly seems possible for other 
applications on all the Mac and Windows printers I've used. This is 
of course essential if you allow your user to set margins and you 
wnat to warn him/her if cropping is likely to occur.

Maybe some more expert person knows what the minimum acceptable 
readable properties which printer drivers have to conform to on 
Revo-supported platforms.

Graham
-- 
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          Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France