Risking a flame attack....
I do think that printing is one of the weak points of MetaCard/Revolution
(and HyperCard before that, but then I gave up using HyperCard's printing
many years ago, in favour of an XFCN which provides a model like that
outlined below). This is one area where I believe RealBasic substantially
scores over MC/Rev.
In RealBasic, one can obtain a 'Canvas' object from a variety of sources:
for example any object that can appear in a window (buttons, fields,
controls etc), as well as windows themselves, but also a printer object. In
the case of the printer object, the size and depth of the canvas depends on
the way the printer object was created (and for example whether the user has
been given the opportunity to do Page Setup) - so it depends on the selected
size and orientation of paper, the selected scaling, whether the printer is
bw/greyscale/colour etc. Given a canvas, you can then draw on it by using
the kind of commands that we all know and love - commands to move around,
draw lines, shapes and text with different sizes and colours, and blat
images. If the canvas belongs to a printer object, then when you're done
you tell it to print the page. (A neat thing is that you can also create an
abstract canvas to draw on offscreen - you can then blit that canvas to
anywhere else, eg blit a portion of it to a window to scroll over the image
you've created.) For some subset of tasks that users of MC/Rev/RB etc might
want to accomplish, I think this model is more flexible, easier to use, and
less susceptible to stange and complicated gotchas. Whether that subset is
more or less than 50%... who can say.
(I did raise this point before in the Revolution list, and was somewhat shot
down, and told that I could achieve any effect I needed by creating objects
on cards, and then printing cards to rectangles within a page. That's true
up to a point; but (a) it got me into doing some contrived and awkward
things and (b) I ran into all sorts of nasty issues of the kind that have
recently been raised in this forum: images with grey backgrounds - partially
solved that, but was left with a gray shadow; having to use a separate
substack with a huge image on it, so that when it was scaled down to print
it was a reasonable resolution - which then produces flashes on screen when
it comes to print. So although the 'into rectangle' option certainly adds a
lot to what you can what you can achieve with printing in MC/Rev, I still
feel that supporting the more direct model would add a lot.)
(And that's without getting into the other way that I think RB would score
over MC/Rev - yet let me say now I still prefer the latter - the true
OOPiness, with subclassing and inheritance. The printing support within RB
just arises naturally out of the way that everything else works. But that's
a whole other invitation to get flamed...)
Yours in swift retreat to the bunker,
Ben Rubinstein | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cognitive Applications Ltd | Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
http://www.cogapp.com | Fax : +44 (0)1273-728866
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