FormatForPrinting

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Graham Samuel <livfoss at mac.com> wrote:
> Thanks Chipp - and Mark, I have no idea if better
> printing is coming  
> along but it certainly should: I do not think
> RunRev's support for  
> printing is adequate for a modern RAD tool: one very
> old issue is  
> that one can't get at the settings made by the user
> in the Page Setup  
> dialog, but others do include the kludge which is
> FormatForPrinting,  
> the great difficulty you have now about working out
> exactly how many  
> pages are needed for a printout of a given field,
> and the fact that  
> you can't find out the limits of the marking engine
> within the  
> printed page for a given printer, despite the fact
> that many other  
> apps obviously do have access to this info, some of
> them on more than  
> one platform.
> 
> I would really like a packaged printing library
> offering a simple  
> reporting feature one could build on, with page
> numbers, headings,  
> previews, back and forth views and so on. I do not
> believe such a  
> thing could be constructed in pure Transcript (or
> Revscript or  
> whatever) today, because not all the building blocks
> are there.
> 
> The usual 2 Eurocents
> 
> Graham
> 

Hi Graham et al,

As you can imagine, I'm all in favour of extended
printing support in the Revolution engine. The whole
formatForPrinting construct is confusing at best and
deserves retirement.
Displaying the page setup and printing dialog boxes
should be extended to letting developers fetch the
necessary printing information as well as sending
printouts to specific printers without having to jump
through hoops with shell or applescript calls.
Previews could be handled by expanding the 'open
printing' command to let you print into a GIF image so
that you can flip through the pages by changing the
currentFrame of an image control.

Nonetheless, I think that Quartam Reports has shown
that you can go quite a long way with pure scripting.
And the combination of 'open printing', 'print into
rect' and 'close printing' allows you to script a
great deal of reports by yourself.
Of course, this is all at the pixel level, unless you
include logic to blow up all the content and scale it
along the way - not an easy exercise.

If you want pin-point precision, you ought to take a
look at the Quartam PDF Library that is now in public
beta test, as this ensures the best cross-platform
output.

Best regards,

Jan Schenkel.

Quartam Reports for Revolution
<http://www.quartam.com>

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)


 
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