[vwnc] Print Preview Solutions for VisualWorks ?

Hello all.

Does anybody know of any print preview solutions for the VisualWorks ?

I found few reference for the "document workbench" but can not find any
specifics.
Does anybody have any idea on ready to use solution for the WYSIWYG
document editing and previewing before printing ?

Any information is greatly appreciated !


Truly

--Mark Pirogovsky


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We do
    - print preview
    - print
    - print to pdf (using a cheap pdf driver)

When you print, at the lowest level (not using Document), you just do
    displayOn: aGc at: aPoint
where "aGc" is a Printer graphicsContext.

Its just like a window, so you have, for example, a Text and you do
    aText displayOn: aGc at: aPoint

You can just as easily take a window with a view in it and get aGc from
that and do
    aText displayOn: aGc at: aPoint

If you have the whole report as a set of Text's and/or Image's, you just
have the window fetch the correct set for the current "page".
We had a more difficult problem, are reports could be arbitrarily long
so we had the report drive the window and had to use Semaphore's to sync
things, but its not really all the difficult.

If you have used "Document" to create a report, you should be able to
copy the
Document classes and modify them to use a window if you want to go that way.
We didn't, we skipped Document and just drove things directly.


Mark Pirogovsky wrote:
--
Dennis Smith                         +1 416.798.7948
Cherniak Software Development Corporation   Fax: +1 416.798.0948
509-2001 Sheppard Avenue East        [hidden email]
Toronto, ON M2J 4Z8              sip:[hidden email]
Canada         http://www.CherniakSoftware.com
Entrance off Yorkland Blvd south of Sheppard Ave east of the DVP


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Print Preview is tricky, at least for graphics + text in Windows,
because VW graphics display is not the same on printers as on the
screen. Lines don't line up exactly, widths are different etc. Text is
worse: there are big differences between font sizes, leading to
different line wrapping. We have some hack code and fudge factors to get
things closer between different platforms and display media, but even so
the differences are painful to look at.

An on-screen print preview will thus not be the same as what you print.
If you increase the resolution when displaying for print preview you can
get a little closer, but then you hit problems because VW can't get a
big enough Pixmap to display on. E.g. if your screen is 75dpi and your
printer 300dpi, you need to zoom to 400% to display (and can scale back
down to make the preview). A full-screen window is around 1MP, so takes
4MB at 32bpp. Displaying that at 400% zoom requires a 64MB Pixmap, which
Windows generally doesn't provide: you get a primitiveFailed. You can
try to handle this and ask for a smaller Pixmap, building up the full
picture by tiling several Pixmaps, but that's hard work and probably
leads to inaccuracies along the edges of the tiles.

One option is to print by displaying to a screen Pixmap rather than
Window, and then print that as a bitmap. Of course you get major
pixelization/jaggies and don't use the resolution of the printer, so
this is better suited to graphics than text. But at least your screen
display is always perfectly WYSIWYG, so you don't even need a separate
print preview.

Printing to something like PDFCreator is a reasonable fix for some
cases, but sadly graphics are further off there than printing directly.

Using Cairo may be part of a future solution, although last I heard its
font handling wasn't very powerful, making ComposedTexts with formatting
changes hard work.

The good news is that this has been the situation for many, many years,
but just recently VW has started to improve in these areas - at least my
ancient support requests on printing are seeing some action, and Cairo
is moving forward.

All the best,
Steve
any
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We use "pdfFactory" -- its advantages are

1. not expensive, I think its $40 per site in single quantities
2. can be configured to create a file in a pre-defined location without prompting the user based on the Printer job-name
   
3. it creates full pdf text, a couple of free drivers we found created pure images
4. we have not found any bugs

When we ask to "print to pdf" we select that driver -- that's a bit messy, we do it by updating the windows registry to make the current printer "pdfFactory", then revert it back to what it was -- this has proven quite reliable.
We print, then we watch the resulting file - it can take a few seconds (or minutes for very long, 100's of pages) reports to finish.  Once the file remains idle for 10sec, we take the file and put it where we want the final result.

Mark Pirogovsky wrote:

Dennis,
Can you share more details on the pdf printing ?
What cheap driver do you use and how ?



--Mark

Dennis Smith wrote:

We do
   - print preview
   - print
   - print to pdf (using a cheap pdf driver)

When you print, at the lowest level (not using Document), you just do
   displayOn: aGc at: aPoint
where "aGc" is a Printer graphicsContext.

Its just like a window, so you have, for example, a Text and you do
   aText displayOn: aGc at: aPoint

You can just as easily take a window with a view in it and get aGc from
that and do
   aText displayOn: aGc at: aPoint

If you have the whole report as a set of Text's and/or Image's, you just
have the window fetch the correct set for the current "page".
We had a more difficult problem, are reports could be arbitrarily long
so we had the report drive the window and had to use Semaphore's to sync
things, but its not really all the difficult.

If you have used "Document" to create a report, you should be able to copy the
Document classes and modify them to use a window if you want to go that way.
We didn't, we skipped Document and just drove things directly.


Mark Pirogovsky wrote:

Hello all.

Does anybody know of any print preview solutions for the VisualWorks ?

I found few reference for the "document workbench" but can not find any specifics.
Does anybody have any idea on ready to use solution for the WYSIWYG document editing and previewing before printing ?

Any information is greatly appreciated !


Truly

--Mark Pirogovsky


_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

-- 
Dennis Smith                 		         +1 416.798.7948
Cherniak Software Development Corporation   Fax: +1 416.798.0948
509-2001 Sheppard Avenue East        [hidden email]
Toronto, ON M2J 4Z8              <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="sip:dennis@CherniakSoftware.com">sip:dennis@...
Canada			         http://www.CherniakSoftware.com
Entrance off Yorkland Blvd south of Sheppard Ave east of the DVP

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