On Wednesday 11 February 2004 06:27, Thomas H. George wrote: > > If this question is regarded as wildly off target for this list,
It probably is, and so, I'll not respond directly to your question, but rather ask a new one... :-) > As a physicist I wrote large programs in Pascal before retiring in > 1994 but nothing since until last week. I thought of a problem I > wanted to solve, read up on C++ and got my program working with only > a few struggles with syntax Great! > but how to write directly to the printer has eluded me. I see. Well, I know very little about C++, but I also wrote a program some time ago in Pascal that produced pretty graphics on HP LJ III-series of printers. Nowadays, I think you would use a library that provides you with an abstraction layer to the printer. I have no experience there, but I think Qt has a print library, and it is written in C++. However, are you sure that you are using the right tool for the job? The nice thing about the Free Software community is that most problems are solved allready, the code is available, and it has undergone extensive though informal peer review. If it is a science problem, I would strongly recommend the R system. I used it for my thesis in astrophysics, and it is really very good. It has a very 1-to-1 correspondance between math and code, and makes any code you write easy to understand and it is very easy to get a good overview. It is really a statistics system, but as far as I'm concerned, it is good for any kind of science. It has a very strong community consisting of some of the main authorities in numerical statistics developing it. See http://www.r-project.org/ It is also packaged in Debian, just go apt-get install r-recommended. It has a large and improving graphics library that will let you make good graphs of your data. It also has bindings to C (and through that, C++) and FORTRAN, so you can reuse existing code within the R framework. If it is not a science project, well, I find that programming at the relatively low level of C++ is usually quite painful and seldomly necessary. I tend to return to Perl programming whenever I need something done. There is a bunch of Postscript modules on CPAN: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=postscript They will probably assist you greatly, should you choose a Perl path. Best, Kjetil -- Kjetil Kjernsmo Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
