Re: [MACTCL] MacCarbonPrint vs. lpr on OS X

[Revar D. <rev...@gm...>]

Hell yes, I'd use it!  The hobby CAD/CAM I wrote uses MacCarbonPrint.   
Please do update it.
And if you can get rotated text in there too, that'd be awesome!  :)

	- Revar



On Feb 21, 2009, at 11:32 AM, Kevin Walzer wrote:

> 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
>
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