rick@kimbal.lynn.ma.us (Rick Kimball) (10/28/90)
I've got this notion of writing a print driver that allows you to output to a variety of standard formats instead of limiting you to a just a printer. You ask, Why would anyone want to do that? Well, it would allow any program to produce G4, TIFF, GIF, PBM, IFF, and others without having to have a converter. The user would just pick the filter for the type of file that they want to produce and give it a name. The FILTER print driver could deal with the rendering and produce a pixmap and then pass that to a converter program that would deal with the pixel manipulation. I've used this basic idea with the standard postscript driver. I went into Excel and created a color chart. After selecting the print option that was redirected to a file on a network disk, I created a postscript version of my graph by picking an "Apple Laserwriter". At that point, I just slid over to my DEC-station and called up dxpsview (an X-Windows postscript preview program) and viewed the same chart. The only problem was that the size of the postscript created file was unwieldy. How hard would it be to write a Print Driver that would take the drawing commands that the application sends and render them on a pixmap? Are there any docs or sample print drivers availble? Rick Kimball | INTERNET: rick@kimbal.lynn.ma.us | UUCP: ...!spdcc!kimbal!rick, ...!spt!kimbal!rick | POTS: (617) 599-8864