Mad printer disease

Two of my home computers managed to croak in the last few weeks, so I'm now
running on what used to be my file/printer server.  The strange thing is
that printing from within Dolphin stopped working, which is a drag because
I've been trying to clean up some PrinterCanvas extensions (yeah, the
devmode thing).  I finally got it working by using Ian's #startDocNamed:
method instead of #startDoc.  What's weird is that it used to work with just
#startDoc.  The printer is an Epson 900 and I'm running Win98.

I'm wondering if printing to a local printer is the culprit.  Since I don't
have a network printer at the moment, can someone try the following with a
local printer (preferably with Win98) and let me know if it works or not.
Of course, if you have other ideas related to this, please let me know.

  PrinterCanvas choose startDoc; startPage; text: 'Test' at: 0@0; endPage;
endDoc

Thanks in advance.

-- Louis

Louis,

> I'm wondering if printing to a local printer is the culprit.  Since I
don't
> have a network printer at the moment, can someone try the following with a
> local printer (preferably with Win98) and let me know if it works or not.
> Of course, if you have other ideas related to this, please let me know.

When I added #startDocNamed: I had a strong suspicion it was just the Epson
printer driver causing the problem, a HP Laser connected to the same machine
did not require the modification.

FWIW, I just tried your test on my local HP Deskjet (Windows XP though) and
it printed correctly.

Regards
    Ian

PS Have you managed to get PrintDialogs and PageSetupDialogs to work
together?. I can get printing to work using either but have had problems
using both with the same devmode.  It is high on my list of things to look
at but if you've already solved it ....

Ian,

Thanks for testing it.  It's very strange though, since I've been sending
Dolphin output, for some time, to the same printer using just #startDoc.
Now it wants to be an Epson 700?  Go figure!

It does, though, make me wonder if #startDoc should just call #startDoc:,
with some default string.

> PS Have you managed to get PrintDialogs and PageSetupDialogs to work
> together?. I can get printing to work using either but have had problems
> using both with the same devmode.  It is high on my list of things to look
> at but if you've already solved it ....

I'm not sure I understand the question.  I'll have some sort of package in a
day or two, but in the meantime, here's the approach I took.  I subclassed
PrinterCanvas (adding an instance variable that stores the devmode
structure), since that seemed the logical place to put this stuff, my
primary focus being on switching the printer orientation.

PrinterCanvas calls PrintDialog, so I precede that call with creation of the
devmode.  Once I have the devmode, I can change the orientation, and create
new instances of (the subclassed PrinterCanvas) based on the current devmode
settings.  I suspect that PageSetupDlg can be called in a similar way using
the devmode instance, but I haven't tried it ... yet.  I'll take a look.

-- Louis