World: r3wp

At work today, and got a chance to try out the postscript printers. 
 It's amazing .. I can print from my draw preview to either the network 
colour postscript printer, or to the old HP Laserjet 4MP on the lpt1:

and with ridiculously little code

I'm wondering now whether the tendency for new printers to have built 
in postscript is going up or down...

I remember that NeXT printers were so cheap because all the postscript 
processing was done by the NeXt OS, and so the printer was just a 
bare engine.

A bit like Windows printers I guess.

If you don't have a postscript printer .. I recall in the old days 
you created a large bitmap in memory, and then printed it all out 
dot by dot.

I remember driving my dot matrix printer like that.

Now to do desktop publishing, need a hyphenation dictionary, and 
a way to do kerning.

Graham, in your demo above
do http://www.compkarori.com/reb/psd2draw.r

How come the text disappears at different sizes ?

If you're talking about the rotated and transformed text, I think 
it's because there's a glitch in the way scaling etc is computed. 
 Probably my fault, and since I don't need scaling or rotations, 
I haven't looked at it very hard.

you can see the same problem with the shaded box which rotates and 
moves in closer to the middle as the size is reduced.

No, I mean all the different text strings disappear and reappear 
at different times as you drag the slider. Something to do with font 
size ?

Maybe scale-draw creates a font object with a size which is not supported 
?

For example, from code that scale-draw produces:

font1: make object! [
		name: "Nimbus Roman No9 L"
		style: none
		size: 33
		color: 255.0.0
		offset: 2x2
		space: 0x0
		align: 'center
		valign: 'center
		shadow: none
	]

font2: make object! [
		name: "Nimbus Roman No9 L"
		style: none
		size: 13
		color: 0.0.0
		offset: 2x2
		space: 0x0
		align: 'center
		valign: 'center
		shadow: none
	]

view layout [box 500x700 white effect [draw [
	box 0x0 493x698 
	fill-pen none 
	box 0x0 493x698 
	line-width 0 

 font font1 pen 255.0.0 text vectorial "REBOL PostScript Dialect" 
 59x68 
	pen 0.0.0 line 59x104 431x104 

 font font2 pen 0.0.0 text vectorial {With this dialect it's possible 
 to easily produce PostScript output.} 79x121
]]]

The second text does not appear for me on View1.3.2.3.1

but it does when font/size is at 15 instead of 13.....

Maybe my fonts are not so complete.

graham, i don't think you want to look at the code (still too ugly), 
but the pdf maker does kerning.

Anton, did you download that font pack I pointed to ?

When I look at the scaling, the only text that does funny things 
is the one that says "transformations"

I see both texts on my system.

as they are true type fonts, they should appear at all sizes.

Gabriele, do you use the kerning for all text placement in pdf-maker?

and where do you get the hint data from?  Is it read from the font 
somehow?

Graham, oh no I didn't, sorry I missed that.

Good idea to put a link to the font pack into the ps2draw.r header.

I've uploaded a new version with that information in the header now.

this version allows you to print to a network printer, to lpt1, or 
to a disk file, and then it calls the RoPS viewer.

A line with embedded CR is now rendered correctly in the postscript 
output.

I have a button "Edit" which imperfectly shows you the dialect source 
( strings lose their quote marks).  Not formatted though.  And save 
which is supposed to re-render any changes doesn't work .. because 
the data needs to be converted from text to a block, and without 
the quote marks for the text, it dies.  Too late for me to find a 
fix.

molded ?

Yeah, "Edit data" just forms the data, mold it instead.

Starting to look very good. :)

update a new version that shows the data formatted.

you can edit and save, and it redraws it.

But there is a context problem with the colours .. so I had to replace 
(red) and (black) with their tuples.

I guess I need to bind somewhere...

mold ?  Oh ... didn't think of that.

with postscript you probably can't control what tray you need to 
print from...?

graham, did you figure out how to use the parallel port and was that 
for printing?

Graham: yes, and data is parsed from the Adobe Font Metrics file 
and included in pdf-maker.r for the 14 standard postscript fonts.

Henrik, my latest demo has a button that prints to the parallel port. 
 As for choosing trays and paper size, I think you can set that in 
the postscript comments.

Gabriele, do you have a reference on how to use this font metric 
data ?

is there a method to center text?

I used a ruler :)

darn it

Ok, let's be serious

hmm... at least measure the size of the text

You can determine the size of the text based on the current point 
size