I very nearly followed this.
But I think there are some amends needed to the Dictionary.
I will endeavour to get my thoughts straight on this, and write a report to
the QCC.
thanks,
Ben
On 13/05/2026 15:50, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
On 2026-05-12 18:35, Ben Rubinstein via use-livecode wrote:
I have a stack which generates a PDF report.
Printing is opened using
set the printPaperOrientation to "landscape"
set the printPaperScale to 0.60
open printing to pdf <filename>
...
The Dictionary entry for open printing doesn't mention the "... to pdf
<filename>" syntax. Although not linked from the entry for "open printing",
the Dictionary does have an entry for the "printerOutput" property, which it
says can be given a few different values, including
file - <filename> : output to the given file. The format of the file
depends on the platform:
preview - output to print preview (only supported on Mac OS X).
I should perhaps clarify - there are indeed two separate things here...
There is the system printer path, and the pdf printer path.
The system printer path is platform-dependent* - it uses the system printer.
On macOS this is PDF based as in the system printer on macOS uses PDFs as the
spool format; on Windows this is not PDF based, it uses some Windows-specific
format I can't remember the name of; on Linux it uses the pdf printer because
the system printer stuff there is basically 'give me postscript or pdf and
I'll do something sensible with it', rather than having a higher-level set of
drawing primitives which then hide the creation of said spool format under the
hood.
This is why the system printer (what you get when don't use 'to pdf') on macOS
can preview and generate files which are PDFs.
The pdf printer path, which is a cross-platform component which does its own
pdf generation and does not use system printing APIs, is what you get when you
do 'to pdf' (in principal, assuming the font files on two systems regardless
of platform are the same, then printing to pdf on those platforms will
generate identical results).
Warmest Regards,
Mark.
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