On 2026-05-12 18:35, Ben Rubinstein via use-livecode wrote:
I have a stack which generates a PDF report.
Printing is opened using
set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
set the printPaperScale to 0.60
open printing to pdf <filename>
...
The Dictionary entry for open printing doesn't mention the "... to pdf
<filename>" syntax. Although not linked from the entry for "open
printing", the Dictionary does have an entry for the "printerOutput"
property, which it says can be given a few different values, including
file - <filename> : output to the given file. The format of the file
depends on the platform:
preview - output to print preview (only supported on Mac OS X).
I should perhaps clarify - there are indeed two separate things here...
There is the system printer path, and the pdf printer path.
The system printer path is platform-dependent* - it uses the system
printer. On macOS this is PDF based as in the system printer on macOS
uses PDFs as the spool format; on Windows this is not PDF based, it uses
some Windows-specific format I can't remember the name of; on Linux it
uses the pdf printer because the system printer stuff there is basically
'give me postscript or pdf and I'll do something sensible with it',
rather than having a higher-level set of drawing primitives which then
hide the creation of said spool format under the hood.
This is why the system printer (what you get when don't use 'to pdf') on
macOS can preview and generate files which are PDFs.
The pdf printer path, which is a cross-platform component which does its
own pdf generation and does not use system printing APIs, is what you
get when you do 'to pdf' (in principal, assuming the font files on two
systems regardless of platform are the same, then printing to pdf on
those platforms will generate identical results).
Warmest Regards,
Mark.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ [email protected] ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Build Amazing Things
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