Printer settings

Help index


Printer type

Choose the type of printer you have here. Beside the recommended postscript printer (for unix) and windows printer (for win32), you may find entries for other printer types here. These are only partially supported: no graphics printing is possible with those printers.

Unix users:
Even if you do NOT have a postscript printer attached to your computer, we recommend using the postscript setup, and filter the output through a software processor (such as ghostscript).

Print command

Specifies the command for printing. Typically, this is "lp" or "lpr". However, for previewing, or if you do not have a postscript printer available, you can also define it to save the output in some file:
    cat > preview.ps
or filter it through ghostscript with:
    cat > tmp.ps; ghostview tmp.ps

Processing the output with a postscript filter (like a2ps or enscript) is done by setting the printers type to dumb, and defining a command like:

    a2ps | lpr

Page format

Page format setting is only possible (required) with a postscript printer. Various standard formats are offered: the US formats letter, legal and ledger (which is landscape 17x11).
The DIN formats include A4 through A6 and B5.

Margins

Margin setting is only possible (required) with a postscript printer. You can set the margins either in inches or in millimeters.

Color printing

Tells the system that the attached printer is a color printer. If turned off, documents are printed in b&w.
Notice that most b&w postscript printers DO interpret color information, and use dithering techniques to simulate greyscales. Often, this does not produce the desired output, and better results may be obtained, by disabling this to force printing in black & white mode.
(for example: the HTML documents' blue anchor texts looks ugly on a low resolution b&w printer).

Changing the default settings

The default settings and the list of offered printCommands can be defined in a host-specific startup file. The original defaults are set in the "host.rc" startup file.
To change these, create a file called "h_myHostName.rc" and add printer setup to this file (take the stuff found in "host.rc" as a starting point.
To provide an example, our in-house setup is included (within a conditional based upon the systems domainName) in that file.

Special note on postscript printing

The ST/X postscriptPrinting classes currently do not know about correct font sizes on your printer (it will parse postscript font metrics files in later versions - if your system provides those metrics files).

In order to find out a fonts size (especially height), ST/X asks the windowServer for the size of the corresponding screen font, and scales the returned value for the printer, using the displays resolution as a scaling factor.
If your screen size in the display settings is wrong, that computation will lead to wrong results - be certain to give the correct dimension in the screen setting dialog.
Wrong printer font sizes are also computed, if the displays font sizes are not correct (for example, when using 75dpi fonts on a 100dpi display).

Further reading

For more information, read "Configuration & Customization".


Copyright © Claus Gittinger Development & Consulting, all rights reserved
Copyright © 1996 eXept Software AG


Doc $Revision: 1.12 $ $Date: 2008/03/31 13:48:16 $