On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Rob Lahaye wrote:
[...]
> 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.
Maybe. How else are people going to specify a number of single pages
or a number of ranges?
a) one at a time
-- we support this now
b) a command line option for each entry (eg. -p 4 -p 47)
-- we have no support for this sort of thing
c) something completely different to what we are used to. Such as
page ranges specified by two command line options: A start poage
and an end page (eg. -s 47 -f 153).
-- we have no support for this either
NOTE: I made up the option letters don't look for dvips options with
that code. In addition, it is possible to do something like (c) with
dvips *but* it uses the first page with the number you specify -- if
you are printing a book with 20 pages of front matter and you want
pages 18-20 you will get the pages from the table of contents or
whatever from the frontmatter not the stuff that would have been
numbered pages 18-20 of the mainmatter.
> "-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
Sure. But in 7 years of LyX's existence nobody has ever mentioned it
being a problem. In fact in all my time on LyX I don't even remember
anyone mentioning using anything other than the default dvips being
used for printing!
> approach. (Notice that the "-" between from/to is currently hardcoded
> in frontends/Liason.C, so not configurable; is that general enough?).
The Liason.C code was originally meant to be in lyxfunc but we
couldn't pass the data (except via XTL or some other elaborate scheme
so I left it in a separate file). As Angus has said the code there
should be shifted to the appropriate controllers now.
> 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.
Maybe we are too configurable in this case. Since it seems every
bloke and his dog is using dvips for printing we should limit support
that _or_ an external script (as Angus suggested). That might also
make John extra happy by removing an entire tab from Preferences.
> BTW: The code in my tree now also checks the page-range against the
> odd/even selection.
I'm not sure what you mean here? Are you saying I can no longer print
the even numbered pages in a range?
> The latter check becomes much more complicated when allowing the
> "comma/-" input for the From field :(.
Hmmm... see Angus' proposed code for the filter (numbers + "," + "-").
If a user goes wild in the from field assume they got it correct and
ignore whatever testing you were doing with odd/even.
I'm still not sure what you'd be testing here? Making sure there is
an odd/even page in the specified range? Why? Does dvips barf when a
selection doesn't contain any pages? If not, why bother checking it?
You can't ensure that a page range even exists in a document (I could
have a 5 page document and ask to print the range 100-105) so don't
get carried away with your checking.
Allan. (ARRae)
