World: r3wp

is there someone who have an idea for printing in rebol on a dot 
matrix printer ? i have to pilot it for printing a pre formated bill 
for dental care.  If anybody see what i mean..  I was wondering about 
how to do it in rebol, by passing by a markup langage but i dont 
know how it work.  if anybody got an idea...

xavier, are you doing it from windows?

yes

i probably have to do it with a tally manesman if it can help

I suppose it doesn't contain any graphics? if that's the case, you 
can print directly to the printer through LPT

yes no graphics and by lpt i think

it typically the kind of paper you got when you went out of the dentist, 
only caracters

and a dot matrix printer is not supposed to be connected by something 
else then the lpt port

if you have access, try this on the machine in a dos prompt:

echo test > lpt1:

yes it s ok

ok, then you can do the same from within rebol. I don't know if you 
can write to LPT from within rebol though, but you can call dos commands 
the same way as you just did with CALL.

yes .... and the format is 80x25 so i can put what i want where i 
want

yes, that should be possible

thanks for your help ... sorry if my question was too simple

no problem. this can be hard to figure out sometimes. at least you 
got at choice between this or going full postscript which is considerably 
harder. :-)

lollllll the tally will not support postscript and i dont need to 
do something harder

You may wnat to investifate Epson escape codes, eg:
http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an10/epson.htm

There is a chance the printer will respond to them, and it may give 
you extra flexibility -- eg sending tabs rather than loads of spaces; 
or bolding, underline etc.

thanks .... terribly usefull too

btw. is there anything like ncurses for rebol?

investifate --> invesigate (though I like the sound of the typo.....The 
sort of thing that happens to extras in the early reels of horror 
movies)

A bit like curses:
http://www.rebolforces.com/articles/tui-dialect/

neat. could sometimes be nice if you are using SSH terminals a lot.

perfect.  It looks like what i need too.

it must be possible to describe a document for a dot matrix printer 
with that

I take it the application is windows based.

So, generate the output as postscript, and then use gsprint to print 
the postscript file to the epson printer ( default windows printer 
).

gsprint will format it for windows.

So Graham, why did you get rid of John's blocks in your fork of his 
dialect? Was it to make generation easier?

it looked ugly

I think John agreed too!

Is the dialect faster to process without them?

never went that far ...

If you like I'll pull my script and post it somewhere for dissection 
and improvement.

That would be cool. I'd like to see if there would be a way to make 
it more powerful, something along the lines of Functional PostScript.

Interesting.

If they can do it in Scheme .. why not rebol?

You'll note that rotations and translations may not work so well.

I always thought Scheme was a little clumsy for that. REBOL should 
be better.

The latest version got rid of many of the blocks:
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/postscript/postscript.html

A test source: http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/postscript/test.txt

if there's anything you need to borrow:

http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html

http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/typesetter.html

Sweet. I'll take a look next week.

Anyone know anything about page size and orientation in postscript? 
I'm trying to implement that in postscript.r. I got EPS partially 
working, but I don't know how printers handle EPS.

eps is just postscript.

but ...

some programs hide binary data in eps for preview purposes

right, but does the printer center the drawing or put it in a corner 
or scale it up or how?

the eps decides that.

I'm just not sure that is a good way to handle page sizes