On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 04:33:52PM -0600, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
David wrote:
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.
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?
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.
Well.. actually, I've never tried writing C++ code, but as a matter of fact, just a day or two ago, I had downloaded some documentation on C++ considering getting into it - mainly for the class structuring.
What I do is mostly graphics, so maybe that changes things.
Well, again, perhaps coincidentally, I had considered converting this program to a GUI app, just for the fun of it, mostly. However, I've been trying to learn GTK. Unfortunately, if I understand correctly, GTK doesn't support printing directly, but you have to extend into the GNOME interface for printer support. I was hoping to not spread myself too thinly by adding another interface (GNOME) to learn.
I use Qt downloaded from their site. Down side of that is that you have to compile it. Upside is that you get everything all at once. Debian has all their stuff but in separate packages.
Anyway, they have a very extensive examples section and excellent documentation that refers to the examples. You can't beat it. So it would be a matter of starting with their examples and changing it. They claim on their site that various universities use them as the C++ teaching tool. Also with them you are platform independent. I have not tried their latest claim to fame: app generation from GUI. I start with code. You might try that too.
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.
I got a "connection refused". Perhaps it was down at the moment. I'll give it a try later, perhaps tomorrow.
Yes I powered down.
HTH
Yes, it has helped. Thanks.
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