At 10:14 AM +0200 17/8/1999, dohna wrote:
>Hiho!
>
>I simply do not understand what you people want!
I understand and agree with most of what you say. I think I triggered
this thread with my "printing trickery" reference, but then found
myself defending Metacard's printing. (:
I still think Metacard's printing problems boil down to two
well-known problems. The Windows font issue and the difficulty of
obtaining the visible text in a scrolling field. If these were
resolved, then we have a very powerful printing tool.
On a more constructive note...
Richard MacLemale wrote:
>Essentially, I created a template stack with one non-scrolling field, with a
>fixed line height. I then created a script that puts your text info into
>the field, decides if it's more than one page, and then automatically
>scrolls the proper amount, printing each page in the process. This involves
>generating enough return spaces at the end of the field so that the last
>page is not duplicate information from the second to last page, AND so that
>it doesn't print a blank last page. What fun!
>
>I've posted the script and other info to a web page, if anyone wants it.
>It's not real versatile... essentially, you fill a variable with whatever
>text you want and then put the variable in the field. And it will handle
>htmlText, though if you try to use a font size larger than 16 it looks like
>crap (because the line height has to be fixed). But it's working great for
>me. It's also worked on my PC, but I think this is probably luck more than
>anything else... I haven't been able to test it on Windows on a wide variety
>of printers yet. Oh yeah, and it's a somewhat ugly hack... but I haven't
>had much formal programming (one course in BASIC back in the 80's).
I just tried doing something similar. As a rule of thumb, I found
setting font sizes for Windows at about 75% of the normal Metacard
screen size to work. Also, setting the rightMargin of the text field
to about 33% of the field width generally covers the text spillover
on Windows. Finally, a topmargin of 5 on Windows and 4 on MacOS seems
to avoid trimmed lines when scrolling in discrete line-sized units.
If anyone has any other magic numbers, please share.
Looking forward to 2.3
Regards
Dave Cragg
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