Re: fltk printing [changest]

[Michael D Godfrey]

 On 07/30/2010 08:24 AM, bpabbott wrote:
> The pixel resolution is from the root property "screenpixelsperinch". 
> Octave determines this automatically, but you are able to change it if 
> you like.
>
> GL2PS is part of Octave's sources. So we can be confident it is present.
I thought that Octave would still compile without the OpenGL stuff, but 
maybe not.
> To make better use of ghostscript we will need to be able to take 
> control over the initialization of gs. That would give use control 
> over the supported media sizes and corresponding margin descriptions. 
> I'm still quite the novice when it comes to ghostscript, but if we are 
>  not able to directly control the media size and margins using gl2ps, 
> then this will be worth doing.
>
> Ben
gs has a very large number of command line options, and makes use of 
configuration
information that it finds in places like .Xresources.  It may be helpful 
to provide a way
for users to directly set the argument values that they want.  Two 
obvious choices are
an environment variable, or a declared string in Octave.  People may 
also want the
ability to either replace all the Octave settings, or append their 
additional arguments.
Allowing users to directly add to the argument list will reduce the need 
to provide means
of setting all the options within Octave.  One obvious case is the 
ability to specify the
printer that you want in the gs arguments.  This causes the output to go 
straight to the printer.

There is a question of how to handle the need for gs.  Ghostscript is 
very widely
available and is a standard part of most Linux distributions.  Systems 
that use
CUPS for printing use Ghostscript, see: http://www.cups.org/
It seems to me that it is
not unreasonable to make a statement in the Octave Manual something like:
"Ghostscript is expected to be available. Conversion of plots to various 
formats
will be restricted if it is not available in your system."

Michael