Re: [Gnumed-devel] printing

[Ian Haywood]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 03:05:22PM +1000, Horst Herb wrote:
> I never was really happy with the way printing was handled with wx.
In what way? IMHO, they have bridged the UNIX/Windows gap in the
least painful way possible. Are you referring to print quality?

> I have been playing with reportlab (the python pdf generator libray) and
> it works like a charm, dead simple & very fast and accurate positioning
> to the mm; printing works by simply piping the pdf through xpdf or
> acroread to the printer.
In terms of printing-position accuracy, it's difficult to see how they
can be better than raw PostScript. My own experience is that the scaling
(720 units = 1 inch) is reasonable (but not exact), but there is often a
translation artifact of up to 1cm
(mind you, on cheap printers it is difficult to position the paper
precisely, high-end printers are probably better.)

Point is, we may still need the adjustment  system for printing
 
> However, I don't know how this would be handled on Windows - any ideas
> anybody? I suppose on OS/X it works just the same as on Gnu/Linux.

AFAIK Windows forbids raw access to the printer port (you can go through
the old MS-DOS API of course, but there's no guarantee the printer on
the other end understands PostScript), putting us back to the Windows/wx
API. Quality should be acceptable (TrueType &c, in any case, pharmacists
and Centrelink bureaucrats cannot be font snobs given the alternative is
our handwriting ;-)

We can have both, as we only really need two underlying primitives 
i.e. draw (X, Y, text, fontsize) and newpage (), this shouldn't be too
hard.

This is only for forms of course, for letters weren't we going to pipe
through AbiWord or similar?

Ian

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