Printer

Description

The Printer class gives you control over the printer, and also allows you to display the standard dialogs related to printing. This is an invisible, top-level object (i.e. it should not be created as a child of a window object).

To use a Printer object, you first create it as a top-level object. You can then if you wish call the Setup and Job methods to display the standard printer page-setup and print-job dialogs, allowing the user to set the printing parameters. Both of these methods return 1 if the user selected OK and 0 for Cancel.

Output to the printer or spool file begins when you Open the printer (this starts a new print job). You have control over the font and placement of the text using the font and position properties. Calling the Print method allows you to print text (either as a character vector, possibly with embedded carriage returns, or as a character matrix). Printing starts at the current position, and the position property is updated at the end of the Print method to reflect where the printing position has reached. If, during printing, the position reaches the bottom margin of the page, a page throw will automatically be generated and printing will resume at the top, left of the next page. You can fine-tune the line height and character pitch using the lineheight and pitch properties.

To draw graphics and arbitrary text on the printer page, you can use the Draw method. (If you have already used the Draw method to create the graphics in a window, you can retrieve a nested array of drawing commands from the window using the Draw 'State' keyword, and then re-submit the same commands to the Printer object as the argument of the printer's Draw method).

The Eject method forces a page throw. When you have output all the text, you call the Close method which ends the print job and submits it to the printer. If you want to abort the print job, call the Abort method.

The margin property, a four-element vector, allows you to set or retrieve the Left/Right/Top/Bottom margins in the current scale. Other useful properties include copies (the number of copies which will be printed), and orientation (a boolean scalar, 0=Portrait, 1=Landscape). These are read-only once the print job has started using Open.

There are a number of read-only properties associated with a Printer object. These include page (the current page number), size (the page size), handle (the handle to the printer record, used in low-level programming), and winptr (the display context/port also for low-level programmng). Under Windows, the fonts property lists available printer fonts.

Note that, although it is possible to create more than one Printer object, only one can be used at a time. In general, we recommend that you do not create more than one Printer in your application.

Automatic (unattended) printing

If you want to print without user intervention (i.e. without displaying a dialog), you must set the parameters for the print job before calling the Open method. You can select the page orientation by setting the orientation property, and (except under MacOS), the number of copies by setting the copies property.

Under Windows only, if you have several printers accessible from your system, you can also select a particular one under program control. The printers read-only property returns a nested vector of the names of each available printer. The printername property allows you to select one of these, or query which one is selected.

Example

     ∇DEMO_Printer;TEXT;PRN
[1]   ⍝ Sample function demonstrating use of the Printer object
[2]   PRN←'⎕' ⎕NEW 'Printer' ⋄ PRN.scale←3 ⋄ PRN.margin←72 72 72 72
[3]   ⍝
[4]   ⍝ Put up the printer select dialog, quit on cancel
[5]   →(0=PRN.Setup)/0
[6]   ⍝
[7]   ⍝ (We could also display the Job dialog here)
[8]   ⍝
[9]   ⍝ Now open the printer to start the job, and print some text
[10]  PRN.Open
[11]  PRN.font←'Times' 36 1
[12]  PRN.color←220
[13]  PRN.Print('Quotation',⎕R)
[14]  PRN.font←'Times' 18 0
[15]  PRN.color←0
[16]  PRN.Print('Let me not to the marriage of true minds',⎕R)
[17]  PRN.Print('Admit impediments.  Love is not love',⎕R)
[18]  PRN.Print('Which alters when it alteration finds,',⎕R)
[19]  PRN.Print('Or bends with the remover to remove.',⎕R,⎕R)
[20]  PRN.font←'Times' 9 2
[21]  PRN.Print 'William Shakespeare'
[22]  ⍝
[23]  ⍝ Close printer to submit the job
[24]  PRN.Close
     ∇

Properties

caption children class color copies data events font fonts handle lineheight margin methods name opened orientation page pitch position printers printername properties scale self size tie units winptr

Methods

Abort Close Create Delete Draw Eject Job New Open Print Send Set Setup Trigger

Callbacks

onClose onDestroy onOpen onSend