Text alignment in generated PDFs (print card from ... to... into...)

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2026-05-12 18:35, Ben Rubinstein via use-livecode wrote:
> I have a stack which generates a PDF report.
> 
> Printing is opened using
>    	set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
>       	set the printPaperScale to 0.60
>   	open printing to pdf <filename>
...
> The Dictionary entry for open printing doesn't mention the "... to pdf 
> <filename>" syntax. Although not linked from the entry for "open 
> printing", the Dictionary does have an entry for the "printerOutput" 
> property, which it says can be given a few different values, including
> 
> 	 file - <filename> : output to the given file. The format of the file 
> depends on the platform:
> 
> 	preview - output to print preview (only supported on Mac OS X).

I should perhaps clarify - there are indeed two separate things here...

There is the system printer path, and the pdf printer path.

The system printer path is platform-dependent* - it uses the system 
printer. On macOS this is PDF based as in the system printer on macOS 
uses PDFs as the spool format; on Windows this is not PDF based, it uses 
some Windows-specific format I can't remember the name of; on Linux it 
uses the pdf printer because the system printer stuff there is basically 
'give me postscript or pdf and I'll do something sensible with it', 
rather than having a higher-level set of drawing primitives which then 
hide the creation of said spool format under the hood.

This is why the system printer (what you get when don't use 'to pdf') on 
macOS can preview and generate files which are PDFs.

The pdf printer path, which is a cross-platform component which does its 
own pdf generation and does not use system printing APIs, is what you 
get when you do 'to pdf' (in principal, assuming the font files on two 
systems regardless of platform are the same, then printing to pdf on 
those platforms will generate identical results).

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Build Amazing Things