stew@harvard.ARPA (Stew Rubenstein) (06/20/85)
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OK, so I've spent maybe two or three months working on this software,
and I've been careful to use only the generic printer routines described
in the phonebook edition of Inside Mac, so that when my LaserWriter
finally arrives, I will be able to draw my pretty pictures (structural
formulas of organic chemicals) on the laserwriter with a minimum of
hassle. It works fine on the ImageWriter, generating surprisingly good
looking structures for a dot-matrix printer. But today I get the
LaserWriter, Set it up, Choose Printer, and print. Gosh, I did things
right! It's printing! Then I look at the printout and feel a large
screw coming at me. All the lines are there, but anything defined with
QuickDraw regions is missing completely. After a short debugging
session, I determined that my program was still working, and that
everything's still great on the ImageWriter. So I call up a friend who
got on an early list for "Inside LaserWriter" (mine was ordered two
months ago and 'will be there Real Soon Now').
Quoting from "Optimizing for the LaserWriter":
Using QuickDraw with the LaserWriter
o Only SrcCopy transfer mode is supported, the other 15 are not.
o The grafverb "invert" is not supported.
o Do not change the origin witin PrOpenPage and PrClosePage.
o Regions are not supported, try to simulate them with polygons.
o Clip regions should be limited to rectangles.
o Rotated or Scaled bit images will not print correctly.
o There is a small error in character widths between screen and
printer fonts, so don't rely on them being exactly the same.
Only the end points will be accurate.
o If you are using PicComments to left, right or center justify
the text, only those points will be accurate.
I make extensive use of regions, and also of odd-shaped clip regions, in
particular, clip regions with holes in them. What do I do now? Learn
postscript? Does the lack of regions indicate a lack of support for
such things in PostScript? Or did Apple just not take the time to do it
right? Will I have to generate the bitmap in bands on the Mac and ship
a 1.25 megabyte bitmap over appletalk?
Be warned.
Stew Rubenstein
Internet: rubenstein@harvard.arpa
uucp: { ihnp4, ut-sally, seismo } ! harvard ! rubenstein
USSnail: Harvard Chemical Labs, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138