> arranged more like it is on the console screen - in tabbed columns. None of > the tutorial type stuff I've seen even mentions printing files,
One reason is that printing is one of those things that is different on evry operating system. So tutorials (including mine) tend to steer clear of it. If you are on Unix its fairly easy to print stuff just by piping stdout to the lpr or pr commands. On Windows I tend to print by creating an HTML file and then using os.system() to print the file using my browser... On Mac tyou can use the Unix trick or convert to PDF. To do proper formatted printing on windows is inordinately difficult and involves effectively printing your page as a graphic to a printer "device context". I seem to recall someone pointing out a printer module which I meant to investigate but never got round to it, maybe trawling the archives would throw it up. > Here is some sample data from the resulting file: > > ((S'Everybody' > S'Anonymous' > Nt(S'James' > S'Austin' > S'704-111-1234' > t(S'Janet' > S'Austin' > S'704-111-1234' > > I would like to see something more like when the file is printed: > > Austin James 704-111-1234 > Austin Janet 704-111-1234 > etc. This is to do with formatting the data into strings before you print it. You can use a format string to define the layout(column widths, justification, number of decimal places etc) andthen send those lines to the printer as described above. If using the HTML trick you need to add the HTML codes too, in this case you would format each row like: fmt = "<tr><td>%10s%10s%3d-%3d-%4d</td></tr>" And then print a table header followed by a loop printing each line of data followed by a close table tag, something like this: text = ''' <html><body> <table> <tr><th>Last</th><th>First</th><th colspan='3'>Phone</th></tr>''' for data in people: #substitute your data here text += fmt % (data[0],data[1],data[2],data[3],data[4]) text += '</table></body></html>' prtfile = open('temp.html','w') prtfile.write(text) prtfile.close() os.system('lynx -p ./temp.html') > Is this a simple task, or am I jumping into deep water? :) > evangelinux GNU Evangelist Given your signature its probably not too difficult, you can just send the basic text string to lpr, or use the html trick above. You might even like to investigate the use of groff to format the text instead of html - that's much nicer and the technique I actually use on Unix. HTH, Alan G Author of the Learn to Program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor