Printing and Rebol

Hi I know, that Rebol(/Tech) is self sufficient enough to be without printing.) But daily life needs some archiving.( I am considering to replace an old printing service, generating around 50 different reports and spreading them around two times per day. Does anyone something similar and how? Just tell me, if you use Rebol for serious printing and what tools you use to support Rebol. So far Gabrielles pdf-make.r looks most promising as a starting point. But I would like at least some graphics primitives too. If noone else has done that already, I have to try my luck with some postscript commands. AR

Hi: I had a similar problem Our REBOL app corrects a lot of psychotechnical tests and had to generated about an hundred report a day -about personality profiles or intelligence tests- some containing graphs. Because of REBOL's lack of print support, I made the scripts generating HTML code and the reports being printed using M$ IE :-( The graph is generated based on a java applet embedded in a HTML template. Works OK ... but I would prefer a direct REBOL print support. Life goes on ... chr==

Hi Christophe

> Hi: > I had a similar problem > ... > chr>

Just an idea (didn't do this yet myself) If you have a Pro version od rebol: Create a well-formed html document using rebol and 'print it, call htmldoc to convert it to postscript. as htmldoc allows reading from stdin / writing to stout, you could use pipes to connect them. a shell script like: rebol -s script-that-creates-html-report-and-prints-to-stdout | htmldoc --some-paramets -f report-file-in-ps-format-OR-/dev/myprinter Jean

Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! On 12-Lug-01, you wrote: s> So far Gabrielles pdf-make.r looks most promising as a s> starting point. But I would like at least some graphics s> primitives too. If you have ideas on how the dialect should handle graphics (that is, if you were to draw a line, what would you write? and so on...) please let me know. Defining the dialect is the hard part, drawing is not difficult (images might require some work, but I haven't looked at them in depth so maybe it will be easy too). Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

Hi Jean I will have a look at htmldoc. Thanks AR ---------------------------------------- Holzammer, Jean wrote: Just an idea (didn't do this yet myself) If you have a Pro version od rebol: Create a well-formed html document using rebol and 'print it, call htmldoc to convert it to postscript. as htmldoc allows reading from stdin / writing to stout, you could use pipes to connect them. a shell script like: rebol -s script-that-creates-html-report-and-prints-to-stdout | htmldoc --some-paramets -f report-file-in-ps-format-OR-/dev/myprinter Jean

Hello Gabriele We could define a graphbox analog to your textbox, where we describe the graphic part of a a page. Two different approaches for the set of graphic primitives came to my mind; 1, with relative positioning starting from current position 'moveto x-start y-start 'style thickness red.green.blue 'lineto x-end y-end 'arc x-center y-center angle 'fill pattern red.green.blue or 2, absolute positioning 'line x-start y-start x-end y-end thickness red.green.blue 'arc x-start y-start x-center y-center angle thickness red.green.blue 'box x-start y-start x-traverse y-traverse red.green.blue 'circle x-start y-start x-center y-center angle red.green.blue What do you think? AR

> -----Original Message----- > From: [rebol-bounce--rebol--com] [mailto:[rebol-bounce--rebol--com]]On Behalf Of > drawing is not difficult (images might require some work, but I > haven't looked at them in depth so maybe it will be easy too).

Hi Robert, of course, document: to-postscript .. ; analog to to-image ... from RT would be the ideal. Then we can send it to whatever local or remote printer we want. But who will produce it? AR

Hello Robert! On 13-Lug-01, you wrote: RM> Why some new dialects? We just need an other canvas to draw RM> on. Robert Because an interactive GUI and a printed (vectorial) layout are two different beasts. Of course, this does not exclude the ability to create a function that will print any REBOL face (that is, vectorizing it instead of just comverting it to an image), but that won't be easy to write. (Any takers? :) Or, just write a function that translates from VID to PDF (but then most VID styles would make no sense, and custom styles would require a face vectorizer anyway). Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! On 13-Lug-01, you wrote: s> of course, s> document: to-postscript .. ; analog to to-image ... s> from RT would be the ideal. Oh, BTW, PS would be easier to handle than PDF, but please note that (even if I fail to understand the reason) Windows does not come with a PostScript interpreter installed, and not everyone has a PostScript printer... The Acrobat Reader and PDF files are MUCH more common than GhostScript and PS files, so PDF makes more sense to me. Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! On 13-Lug-01, you wrote: s> We could define a graphbox analog to your textbox, where we s> describe the graphic part of a a page. I'd like to have graphics primitives on the same level of a textbox (this is what actually happens in the PDF language). s> Two different approaches for the set of graphic primitives s> came to my mind; [...] The first is the PDF way. That is, you specify a "path" by defining its starting position and then the lines/curves that compose it. Maybe we could go this way: 'line xs ys xe ye 'path [x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 'bezier xc1 yc1 xc2 yc2 x4 y4] BTW, s> 'arc x-center y-center angle PDF has the more general BEZIER curve. But maybe we should include arcs and circles for convenience in the dialect? Anyone has better ideas? (A Logo-like dialect, maybe?) Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

Hi Gabriele

> PDF has the more general BEZIER curve. But maybe we should include > arcs and circles for convenience in the dialect? > > Anyone has better ideas? (A Logo-like dialect, maybe?)

Hello Brett! On 14-Lug-01, you wrote: BH> If you build a "low-level" dialect for outputting PDF then BH> later more abstract dialects can be built on top of it to [...] pdf-maker.r already has two levels. One is the PDF lowlevel format; as long as you know PDF and a couple of things about the lowlevel dialect you can build any PDF file, with the code handling stream sizes and the xref table automatically. The other (higher) level is that of LAYOUT-PDF. This is what you'll probably use if you're writing your own dialect but don't want to bother about reading the whole PDF specification. Of course, stacking up too many layers affects performance and introduces subtle bugs. I think, however, that <= 3 layers is still acceptable if doing without would be too much of a pain. BH> All of these could be simpler if leveraging off your lower BH> level dialect. The lower level dialect remaining unconcerned BH> by the final user's requirements for output. I still think no-one would need to go that low-level, unless you're going to do something very special; but the lower level is accessible anyway --- it just isn't documented yet. :) Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

> -----Original Message----- > From: [rebol-bounce--rebol--com] [mailto:[rebol-bounce--rebol--com]]On Behalf Of > abstract dialects can be built on top of it to provide value added stuff, > perhaps with a pass-thru to the lower level if required.

Hi Gabriele

> Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! > On 13-Lug-01, you wrote: > Gabriele. > --

Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! On 15-Lug-01, you wrote: s> But PDF files are still not printable from Rebol alone without s> manual intervention s> and a second program (AcroReader), as I believe. In a Unix environment, as long as you have print filters set up correctly you should be able to print the PDF directly from REBOL. At worst, you'll have to write a small shell script that pipes the PDF from REBOL to GS. On windows, you'll usually just BROWSE the PDF file, so the user can see a preview and then print it. If you need it to print automatically from Windows you'll probably need /Pro features, but maybe there are other ways too. Anyway, a PS or PCL generator can be useful too! Any takers? Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! On 16-Lug-01, you wrote: s> Ghostscript on Windows reports an error, when displaying s> pdf-maker-doc.pdf [...] Ah! I now see why Ghostscript was failing on files created by PDF Maker. I misread the section about the XREF table and was generating a wrong table; the Acrobat Reader seemed to ignore it at all, because of another bug in my code. All these should now be fixed; you can find the new script at: http://web.tiscalinet.it/rebol/pdf-maker.r The downloader on my REB site should still work but pdf-maker-doc.r is just a test file now and not the real doc (didn't have the time to write it yet). BTW, this new version includes some graphics primitives too, but no documentation on them yet; if you're brave enough you could have a look at the grammar to see what you can do. Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

Hi everyone, I currently can't access your reb site, I have noticed that this often happens for the various REBOL sites... is everyone experiencing this instability? I use a corporate ADSL modem through a proxy and regularly get 160kB/Sec transfers... so I don't think its a connection issue!? -Maxim

Hello Gabriele

> Hello [sqlab--gmx--net]! > On 15-Lug-01, you wrote: > At worst, you'll have to write a small shell script that pipes the > PDF from REBOL to GS.

Hello Maxim! On 16-Lug-01, you wrote: MO> I use a corporate ADSL modem through a proxy and regularly MO> get 160kB/Sec transfers... so I don't think its a connection MO> issue!? Maybe the desktop has problems with proxies? Or is REBOL itself having problems? Did you try reading from the console or from your web browser to see if the problem is in the ISP I'm using or on your part? If others have problems with my current address, I will try other ISPs. Regards, Gabriele. -- Gabriele Santilli <[giesse--writeme--com]> - Amigan - REBOL programmer Amiga Group Italia sez. L'Aquila -- http://www.amyresource.it/AGI/

HI, I was browing files at the time (actually I was scanning several other reb sites) and yours didn't go through... maybe I should try again today !? :-) -Max