From: Kevin W. <kw...@co...> - 2009-02-21 23:17:16
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Linus Nyberg wrote: > 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 > Hi Linus, Thanks so much for your reply! I know that Farmers WIFE had contributed in the past to MacCarbonPrint's development, but I didn't realize you were still involved with it. I would gladly defer to your experience on this project if you have a definite idea where you want to go with it. My thinking is that since Carbon is more or less deprecated on the Mac, a port of the printing extension to use Cocoa/Objective-C dialogs would help ensure its viability for years to come. To my knowledge, Mats had already done a great deal of cleanup of the base code of the extension to use CoreGraphics intead of QuickDraw. That's probably the biggest challenge, and it's already done. Implementing Cocoa dialogs will take some work, but my guess is that it won't be as difficult. My experience with Cocoa/Objective-C is pretty modest, but I'm learning, and it would certainly be easier for me to contribute there than with the CoreGraphics stuff. "lpr" is the classic Unix "line printer" command. It's useful for command-line printing. It lets you print a text or PostScript file to a printer. It fits well with Tk on Unix since the canvas widget can output its content as PostScript. It's also fine for printing plain text. That's how I use it. It probably would not be appropriate for the kind of complicated reports that Farmers WIFE uses. Thanks, Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com |