Hi Graham,
Recently, I bit the bullet and created my own print routines which print a field of htmlText of any size. It also has a nifty feature in that it creates preview imgs on the fly.
Basically, it's pretty simple. Here's how I did it.
I create two separate stacks: Print and OffScreenPrint The Print stack has a substack called "Preview"
The reason for the 2 stacks, is that you need to be able to 'save' the offscreen stack after you set the "formatForPrinting" property (Windows only).
Forgetting for a moment the print preview mode, the guts look like this:
Call the PageSetup function (answer printer) and from this you get the printPaperSize (tPageHeight and tPageWidth). You can use these to setup your offscreen imaging stack. You also get the printMargins as well. Use these also to setup your offscreen print stack.
Before calling the print routine, you'll want to 'render' all your text to the offscreen stack. Basically, you copy it to the main field of the offscreen stack (or set the htmlText of the field) then check to see if the formattedheight is too great for the field. Remove words (or paragraphs, your choice) from the end until the field fits on the card w/out overflowing. Then create a new card and continue. Do this until all your text/htmltext is gone. Now you have a bunch of cards in your offscreen stack to print from.
You can easily use shared groups (backgrounds) for adding headers and footers.
Before printing, set the formatForPrinting prop to true and save (you don't want to copy/paste stuff while it's set to true because it may cause problems). Now close the stack (delete stack will remove it from memory, which is what you want to do) and open it back up offscreen.
Oh, btw, you want to set the margins of your fields on the offscreen stack to something high (I use 10) to keep it from 'cutting off letters.'
Now, the guts of the printing goes something like this:
open printing with dialog put item 1 of printPaperSize into tW put item 2 of printPaperSize into tH
--> DO PAGE CREATION STUFF HERE --> COPY THE TEXT TO STACK "offscreenPrint" --> CREATING A NEW CARD FOR OVERFLOW UNTIL NO MORE OVERFLOW --> SET formatForPrinting to True AND SAVE STACK THEN CLOSE/OPEN
put the number of cds in stack "offscreenPrint" into tNumPages
set the defaultStack to "offscreenPrint"
repeat with x = 1 to tNumPages
go cd x
print card into 0,0,tW,tH
if x <> tNumPages then print break
end repeatclose printing
That's pretty much all there is to it. If you want, you can even create bitmaps from the offScreen stack which act as *very accurate* print previews. I dump them into the Preview stack and set the preview img to 1/2 the size with resizeQuality set to best. Works beautifully, both on Mac and PC.
HTH,
Chipp _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
