printer-driver

Printer driver for REBOL, supports Windows and UNIX (through CUPS), so it runs fine both on Linux and MacOS X too.

Requirements

You need REBOL/View and /Library component in order to use this driver.

How to use it?

If you have cloned locally this repository, enter the repo and just do it!

do %printer-scheme.r

Alternatively, you can also install it from network when needed:

do https://raw.github.com/dockimbel/printer-driver/master/printer-scheme.r

The driver installs a new printer:// scheme. Usage is then pretty simple:

write printer:// <document>

or

write/custom printer:// <document> [<options>]

<options> are:
    printer "<name>"	: use a specific printer instead of default one
    doc-name "<title>"  : give a title to the document

It is also possible to list all the printers available using:

printer/enum

for example, from the console:

>> probe printer/enum
[
    "Samsung ML-1670 Series" [none local]
    "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" [none local]
    "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" [none local]
    "Lexmark 3500-4500 Series" [none local]
    "Fax" [none local]
    "EcoFax" [none local]
    "Bullzip PDF Printer" [none local]
]

Note: it would be nicer if we would use get-modes on the port to retrieve that instead of tapping directly into the global printer context. It's just a few more lines of code, any taker? :-)

The additional block after each string is for storing some flags. local or remote flags are used to indicate if the printer is locally connected or on a remote computer. You can then use one of the string name reported here as argument to printer option described above. Please copy this block and strings if you need to modify them (it's just an internal data structure exposed).

In order to print multiple pages, or to stream pages to printer one by one, it is possible to manually operate the printer port:

p: open printer://
insert p 'start-doc		; declare a new document to print

insert p 'start-page		; open a new page
insert p page1			; print content of the page 1
insert p 'end-page		; close page

insert p 'start-page		; open a new page
insert p page2			; print content of the page 2
insert p 'end-page		; close page

insert p 'end-doc		; flush all to printer and close document to print
close p				; close printer port

In case you want to hack something in the driver, you can start by looking at the platform-specific locals object!, especially caps and scale properties:

p: open printer://
probe p/locals
close p

How to create a document to print?

The format used for describing documents used by the printer scheme is the DRAW dialect, or rather a subset of it. Only the following DRAW commands are accepted:

text
line
line-width
box
arc
font
pen
fill-pen
image

An addition has been made to the dialect for specifying a custom area of multiple lines of text:

text-box <text> <position> <size>

<text>     : string! value, text to print, wrapping on newline markers
<position> : pair! value, position of left top corner of the text area
<size>     : pair! value

Note 1: The syntax for text command is reversed compared to Draw dialect:

text <text> <position>

Note 2: I can't remember why I haven't used the more common area word instead of text-box...

Simple Example

write printer:// [
	pen blue
	text "Hello World!" 100x100
]

A complete example can be found in the tests/ folder.

License

BSD license.

Enjoy!