Printing Hell

[Timothy Miller]

At 12:12 PM +0000 1/24/05, Mark Smith wrote:
>Frank, thanks for the suggestion, however, I've now made some basic 
>discoveries and resolved my immediate difficulties.
>
>Three basic facts that I can find no mention of in the docs, though 
>perhaps they're covered in the 30 quid tutorial:
>
>1. Unlike every other piece of software on my hard disc, everything 
>on the printed-from-rev page is bigger than I expect - 9 point text 
>printed from Rev will be at least two point sizes bigger than the 
>same 9 point text printed from textEdit or Appleworks for example. 
>Solution - set the printScale to 0.85, presumably this is 
>screen-resolution dependent, so in the absence of documentation 
>experimentation is necessary.
>

--snip--

I'm just preparing for the transition from HyperCard to Rev. In 
preparation, I've replaced several 9 to 5 Reports reports with plain 
8.5 X 11 inch hyperCard stacks, and a few thousand lines of 
hyperTalk. These must print on pre-printed, machine-readable forms, 
so the print registration must be precise. Just to set up the HC 
pages, I had to write elaborate scripts to position, align, name and 
number the innumerable fields and checkboxes, and set their 
attributes. It's been a big job.

I'm happy to report it all works perfectly in HC, now. I even have 
buttons to move everything around on the page, if a different printer 
registers a little differently.

Accordingly, the information about printing in Rev in this thread is 
rather discouraging. Unless I've misunderstood something basic.

Yes, I *could* export the data as text with delimiters to a database, 
and report from the database. I suppose I could even export it as an 
rtf file and print it from a word processor. There are other ways, 
also, probably. I'd rather poke needles in my BOTH my eyes! I don't 
know how to do this sort of thing, and learning how is not my idea of 
a hobby.

If this is going to be a serious obstacle to a transition to Rev, I 
think I'll stick with HC until Rev's printing problems are fixed. Are 
they going to be fixed? Any guess as to when? Do the people at Rev 
consider them problems?

I hear there's a reports external on its way for Rev. That might be 
okay, but now that my reports work perfectly in plain hyperTalk with 
plain fields and checkboxes in plain stacks, it is rather refreshing. 
It would be nice to just leave them that way.



Please advise,


Tim miller