Hiho!
I simply do not understand what you people want!
Someone wrote, printing was essential for business applications. True,
true, true! We have an information system and what most people do with
it is printing. I dont print that much myself, but our customers print
as if it was the last thing they do.
But business customers insist on the ability to create their own
documents. In our system they decide what and how they want to print.
They want headers and pagination and logos and everything. They dont
accept a single line of text at the bottom of a page or headlines
detatched from their text body. There are soooooo many issues about
printing that we simply have decided to generate rtf and have a text
processor print it... and our customers accept that with no problem.
Hey: They can edit the templates just as much as they like.
I read that people want the print field command back. In the good old
days when there still was a HyperCard, everything was so much easier!!!
But go back and take look at those "applications" we have created!
Things where fun and easy and quickly done. But customers do not accept
that level of "visual quality" any more. Especially when it comes to
printing they will never accept anything but perfection... they are
presenting themselves with what they print!!!
The print field command is very useful for debug output, but not much
more. The HyperCard report generator is nice... but it is not flexible
enough. You have all the flexibility built into MetaCard and you can
create your own report generator with all the features you need... so I
am very curious about how MetaCard 2.3 will better support printing. The
whole discussion I have seen so far is not very constructive. Everybody
complains about how bad printing was supported, but there is hardly any
suggestion on how to improve on it.
I write all of this because I am scared that Scott might concentrate too
much on adding printing abilities and does not find the time to add so
essential things as a tree view control, just because nobody talks about
that any more.
Regards
R�diger
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