Porting PrintReport (was: Re: Windowscript)

[Graham Samuel]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 12:37:12 -0800, Stephen Quinn Barncard
>
>I'd be happier if he'd bring Printreport to the OSX world, otherwise
>I'd still be using his XCMDs... actually for some stacks to difficult
>to convert right now, I do and use it every day in Classic.
>
>Even better would be to develop a library for Rev, then everybody
>would be happy.
>
>It got to the point that Hypercard was an ideal interface and glue;
>but the XCMDs did most of the work.  I would often have over 50 in a
>project and still have thousands of them on a CD. Too bad they can't
>run in X. It's still PPC code resource - but calls the old APIs...
>damn..
>
>But Compilit! - Whoa, Tom Pittman, what a genius...maybe he could
>make a cross platform XCMD generator that runs Transcript...

 From what I remember of PrintReport, (I used it with SuperCard a few 
years ago now), pretty well all of the functionality could be 
repeated in Transcript, thus making it truly cross-platform. It would 
also be possible to produce a less hard-to-use interface, IMO - I 
would not personally consider trying to reproduce the interface 
itself, which is more in the style of a special language executed by 
a home-grown interpreter rather than a set of functions and 
parameters. I guess the interpreter could be written on top of the 
Transcript version for compatibility reasons, but I very much doubt 
if there would be enough customers to make it worthwhile

A limitation in the Transcript version if written today would be a 
pesky problem that has long worried me - RunRev doesn't give the 
scripter access to printer parameters, particularly the maximum 
printable area on a page; this means that it's impossible to produce 
a sensible routine for handling margins in any kind of reporting or 
printout function. When last I grumbled about this I didn't get much 
support from other listers, but it seems to me an essential function, 
and one which it must be feasible to provide for at least the Mac and 
PC platforms, judging by the various apps out there that exploit this 
information (MS Word for PC and LemkeSoft's Graphic Converter for Mac 
are two that I usually mention).

Others have pointed out that this would probably not be a commercial 
success even as shareware, but I think it may be worth further study 
- no doubt the devil is in the details, and I still have my 
PrintReport manual. I will see if I can look at this more closely and 
tell the list what I've found in a few weeks from now. Unless 
someone's done all this already?

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