From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,7b9027678f309105 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Al Christians Subject: Re: Laser printing from ADA (Windows) Date: 1998/10/24 Message-ID: <36317DF5.3704A493@easystreet.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 404537602 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: news6.ispnews.com 909212580 206.103.35.63 (Sat, 24 Oct 1998 03:03:00 EDT) Organization: Trillium Resources Corporation MIME-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: achrist@easystreet.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 03:03:00 EDT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-10-24T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Ehud Lamm wrote: > > Is there a package/binding that gives you easy printing functionallity > from Windows. I basically want to be able to draw rectangels, print text > etc. I do not want to deal with low level details. > I would also be interested in whatever solutions might be available or easily devised for preparing good-looking documents programmatically from Ada code under MS Win32. The basic idea of Windows is that you're not supposed to have to worry too much about it. If you can put it onto the screen, Windows and the (printer, etc) drivers are supposed to be able to print it, fax it, or whatever. There are standard editor and viewer routines and programs (not in Ada) that should be easy to call from Ada that can handle the display and printing of the data. The problem is preparing the document in the right format. Here are some things that might work under Windows: 1. Ascii text -- This is very limited, but the easiest to create. 2. HTML -- Any good general purpose Ada HTML generator packages? Unfortunately, HTML is not particularly strong at specifying the appearance of a printed page. Will XML be any improvement for that purpose? 3. RTF -- Maybe only a little more complicated to generate than HTML. It has facilities for mail-merge type document creation, embedded graphics, etc. This was my best choice for rapid mass- customization of documents. Unfortunately, I have not found that there is much code available for generating RTF programmatically. Would this be a good use for Ada? 4. PS and PDF -- These are more complicated. There is a C program called Lout that can generate these from specially marked-up Ascii text. You could generate the Lout input in Ada. 5. Crystal Reports -- Set up your document as a report. Put the custom data in a text database written from your (Ada) program. Call Crystal as a DLL (from Ada or otherwise). The conventional (non-Ada, off-the-shelf) solutions are fairly competitive if you have adequate money, adequate bandwidth to the user's desktop, and performance is not a problem. I had an application recently where all that was not quite true. We were supposed to come up with a program that could be distributed on diskettes and would put a good-looking report of about 10 pages with about 1000 customized fields on the screen in about 10 seconds with wysiwyg printing. TIA for any suggestions about how to meet such requirements. Al