nayeri@cs.umass.edu (Farshad Nayeri) (09/10/90)
At the risk of being redundant, I have been wondering why no one has yet written a Chooser document that will dump a pure PostScript or EPSF file (with some options previously specified from Chooser, e.g., folder to put the ps file, or the name of the ps file.) Please do realize that I know about the little utilities that hack the apple f/k hack (like LaserInit). What I don't understand is that since the Mac interface has the hooks to do the job nicely (i.e. through chooser documents), why hasn't anyone done it? I understand that Apple may not want to do something like this, because this will make it easier for people to use printers from other hardware companies. But there are many creative minds out there working on little utilities for Macintosh other than people at Apple, so I must be missing something, right? On a similar note, couple of years ago, I had to use Hypercard Reports! which also came with a neat chooser document called "Preview". It allowed you to preview what was going to be printed on the screen. Once again, an elegant solution which would work great if Preview would have been more flexible. This would have reduced the modes of packages like MS Word by one. Anyone knows what happened to the Preview chooser document? Thanks, --farshad -- Farshad Nayeri Object Oriented Systems Group nayeri@cs.umass.edu Computer and Information Science Dept. (413) 545-0256 University of Massachusetts at Amherst
philip@minnie.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick) (09/12/90)
In article <NAYERI.90Sep9230251@ibis.cs.umass.edu>, nayeri@cs.umass.edu (Farshad Nayeri) writes: > > At the risk of being redundant, I have been wondering why no one has yet > written a Chooser document that will dump a pure PostScript or EPSF file (with > some options previously specified from Chooser, e.g., folder to put the ps > file, or the name of the ps file.) [..etc...] Actually, Adobe (creators of PostScript) announced the intention to market their own Mac printer drivers which will do exactly this. I can't remember details like when it's supposed to be appearing (maybe someone from Adobe can follow up). I'm not sure how easy it would be to do ones own version of the Apple printer drivers by hacking Apple's code (if this is what you were suggesting). Writing a Chooser-based driver from scratch is not trivial. Philip Machanick philip@pescadero.stanford.edu