Allan Rae wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Garst R. Reese wrote:
>
> So you should really allow "," and "-" in the From field so we
> can once again write:
> 35,45,47,50-59,65,66
>
> And if either of those characters appears in the from field the to
> field should be be disabled (maybe... IIRC the output is written as:
> -pp <From>-<To>
> so if you left the To field active you'd only need to remove any
> trailing commas from the From field. Hmmm, that may have been how it
> used to work actually... and so your example of "from 35,45 to
> 53,210" would be output as:
> -pp 35,45-53,210
Thanks Allan. That helps.
*BUT*: we are violating the configurable printing setup from the
preferences here, by allowing input that is very, very specific to
dvips.
"-pp" is configurable in the preferences and we should keep its
arguments as general as possible. There will always be the
straightforward from/to input for whatever is used instead for
an alternative dvips (say ${dvips}) and "-pp" (say ${pp}):
${dvips} [...] ${pp} ${from}-${to}
with ${from} and ${to} simple integer numbers.
The comma and "-" input for the From field violates this general
approach. (Notice that the "-" between from/to is currently hardcoded
in frontends/Liason.C, so not configurable; is that general enough?).
My point is: we try to make the printing as configurable as possible
in preferences, but allow an input in the print dialog, that is very
specific to one particular command! Something tells me that's not
right.
> I should have remembered this feature when we were discussing the
> reorganisation of the Print dialog -- I did have a nagging feeling
> there was something different about the handling of the from and to
> fields and now I know what it was! If only I'd added a comment
> somewhere to this effect (hmmm, actually I have another nagging
> feeling that I got started writing a filter for the from field but
> didn't get it finished but the code was in a large comment in the
> filter file).
Yes, I saw that and used parts of it for my total rewrite of the code;
I didn't realize it pointed at an input filter for the From input, though.
BTW: The code in my tree now also checks the page-range against the
odd/even selection. The latter check becomes much more complicated when
allowing the "comma/-" input for the From field :(.
Regards,
Rob.
