From: Linus N. <li...@fa...> - 2009-02-21 23:09:57
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Hi Kevin! We have a commercial app (Farmers WIFE) that heavily depends on the MacCarbonPrint extension. I am also one of the developers on the MacCarbonPrint SourceForge project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tclbitprint), and have contributed with some things that we needed for our app. But sadly I have never had time to learn it as well as Mats knew it. The extension has broken down a few times - when Apple changed something, when Leopard support was needed, when the big changes Mac Tk happened a year ago... Whenever this happened Mats was incredibly helpful and saved us. Next time it happens I suspect I will have to roll up my sleeves and fix it myself. It's absolutely critical to us and we use all the little things like being able to preset page format settings before showing the dialogs, and saving the page format and printer settings to an XML file (so we can store different page formats for different reports). I have to confess that I don't know that much about lpr though, or what you can do with it. Linus -----Original Message----- From: Kevin Walzer [mailto:kw...@co...] Sent: den 21 februari 2009 20:32 To: tc...@li... List Subject: [MACTCL] MacCarbonPrint vs. lpr on OS X Hi all, I'm looking into the possibility of porting the late Mats Bengtsson's MacCarbonPrint (http://tclbitprint.sourceforge.net/maccarbonprint/maccarbonprint.html) package to use Cocoa API's instead of Carbon. Mats did a big update of MacCarbonPrint a couple of years ago to use the modern CoreGraphics API instead of the ancient QuickDraw API--so I think the main task to make the extension fully modern would be to port the Carbon print dialog to Cocoa (the relevant code is about 2,000 lines of C). Before I undertake this, however, I wanted to see if there is any real constituency for this Tcl extension. Based on my survey, I can only find a couple of applications that use the MacCarbonPrint extension--and one of them is Mats' own app, Coccinella. From what I can tell, nearly every other Tk application that has to do printing on the Mac--even expensive commercial apps--uses lpr. I've used both Mats' package and lpr in my apps. The benefit of using MacCarbonPrint is native dialogs, and being able to export a document to PDF--you get that for free using Mac-native API's. It adds a classy touch to Coccinella, for instance. However, my experience with MacCarbonPrint is that, for all its Mac-native goodness, it doesn't offer a huge improvement over lpr. In fact, while printing from a canvas via MacCarbonPrint works well, printing from the text widget is broken. (I contributed a patch to Mats that takes text from the text widget and dumps it to a canvas; then text printing works, sort of.) After being frustrated by the text output from MacCarbonPrint, I finally implemented a 200-line Tcl package that wraps lpr and presents a nice dialog to the user. It's not as native, but the text output is better. What do others think? Would you be likely to use an update MacCarbonPrint, or is lpr "good enough" for your Tk Mac apps? (In fact, should I just release my lpr-wrapping package under an OSS license instead of updating MacCarbonPrint?) --Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Tcl-mac mailing list tc...@li... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcl-mac |