I know this has nothing to do with Debian, but, really, I don't know exactly where to ask this question anyway.
I have a program for my personal use, written in C. It's a records-keeping application. So far, for my hardcopy, I simply fopen /dev/lp0 and talk straight to the printer. My output is just a few reports, all with a tabular output, and about the only printer manipulations I need is to change the character size in an instance or two. For some level of versatility, I store the code definitions for the fontsize and whatever else in a configuration file. This has worked rather well, but I'd like now to make it "neater". I'd like to let the program do a generic output and let the Linux drivers handle the details, but I'm not sure as to the best method to accomplish this. I've examined several real applications and googled the best I know how, but haven't come up with anything definitive.
The solution I've come up with is to rely upon Latex. That is, generate the output text, insert any tex formatting and send this to a temporary file, let "dvips" convert to postscript and pipe this to "lp" or "lpr".
Could someone indicate whether this is reasonable, or is there a more straightforward approach? At this time, I cannot think of one... Again, I realize that this is entirely off-topic, but any hints would be appreciated.
I use Qt from Trolltech for that sort of stuff. Granted that means C++. If that is no problem, everything becomes easier because you use its classes for everything, including printing. What I do is mostly graphics, so maybe that changes things. Anyway I have an example:
http://esquipulas.homeunix.com/index.php?p=46
If the server is up that shows you what I do with Qt and then you print it using its classes, giving you a .ps file, shown there too, or going straight to the printer.
HTH
Hugo
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