On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:20:00 -0700, John Doty wrote: >> The issue of printing schematics is going to be one which just about >> every Windows user is going to bump their head against.
Not only windows users. I am weary to flex my scripting muscles for workitems I do just once a week. >> The concept of >> running scripts (or even programmes) from a command prompt is just not >> a part of most users paradigms - even engineers, to my surprise. > > gEDA's a flexible toolkit that supports multiple flows. No, it does not. Support for a GUI oriented printing is minimal. Even the most common tasks like PDF output of the current schematic need non- trivial customization. See the wiki faq on this. > Scripting is a critical part of this. Anyone who can't do scripting > is going to be in for endless frustration: printing is just a tiny > issue. In other words: It does not properly support a GUI driven work-flow. >> Getting a multipage schematic print out from gschem is a (relatively) >> complex task. > > Nah. And how are you going to fix this? For example, how do you decide > *which* pages belong to *which* schematic? Let the user decide which pages to print and create a customized print- config file from the input of the user. Just an example how this might fit in the current GUI: 1) Let the printing dialog open a page manager window with the additional button "Create Batch Print Config". This button will create and save a config file to print all the schematics currently selected. 2) Add the print action "print batch" to the file menu. This action will ask for a batch print config file to actually do the printing. If the "config file" is actually a makefile, the batch print action would be trivial to implement. An additional benefit would be, that batch printing could be done offline. This GUI approach wold mix well with a scripting oriented work flow. > With gEDA, make, and other tools, it's easy to assemble project > documentation, as comprehensively as the project needs. No it is not. You need to be fluent in some scripting language to come up with a solution from scratch. > That's much more > power than just being able to simply print schematics. More power, but not easy. The current thread shows how bumpy the scripting road can be, even to a knowledgeable user. Please don't claim more to geda than there actually is. ---<(kaimartin)>--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak tel: +49-511-762-2895 Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: +49-511-762-2211 Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmk&op=get _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list geda-dev@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
