> what is the nice way to provide a print function on a dot matrix > printer for django apps aside from generating a printer friendly page?
My understanding is that there isn't any "nice way...aside from generating a printer friendly page". The web browser can render to a printer context. This might be a regular printer, a PDF, a text-file, or a generic text-only printer. Dot-matrix printers do support graphics, but each has its own PCL for creating them. I've written my share of dot-matrix printer drivers back in the DOS days (and thermal "dot-matrix" printers by the likes of companies like Zebra, Epson, and Brother). Each has its own peculiarities and none of them were as easy/simple as just drawing on a canvas. The printer driver(s) will sit between your browser's print functionality and the printer. If you have a true printer driver designed to print graphics (like most win32 dot-matrix printer drivers are set up to do), it's painfully slow, loud, and low-resolution. You can set up a generic text printer driver in Win32 (and usually a similar "lp" setting on *nix). With this driver, only text gets sent to the printer (perhaps with a few scant formatting options for bold or underline). This is much faster for printing, but does text only (possibly including a few "graphical" glyph characters). Thus, you need to make a text-only "printer-friendly page" and then print to a "generic text only printer" driver for best/fastest results. A freak alternative would be if the dot-matrix printer was hooked up to your *server* (rather than your browsing machine). Django/Python could send text to the printer device directly, but this removes some of the benefits of the web such as non-locality. My $0.02 (adjusted for inflation, minus taxes and social-security, that ain't worth much) -tim --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
