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From: fgreco@govt.shearson.COM (Frank Greco)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Hardcopy in X
Message-ID: <9009061401.AA02648@islanders.>
Date: 6 Sep 90 14:01:25 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 42

>Does anybody know of a strategy to obtain hardcopy from X clients that is
>not restricted to the server's display resolution? For example, I would like
>to preview an X-Y plot on a window and then get hardcopy from a 300 dpi 
>PostScript printer, without being restricted to 75 or 100 dpi on the printer.
>
>SHYAM MITTUR


Most 3rd party and public domain plotting programs have Postscript support 
so its a no-brainer if thats the case.

If you are writing your own routines, you typically have some sort of data structure
that describes the things you're plotting (e.g., a display list).  In your
repaint proc, you traverse your data structure and call the appropriate Xlib
routines to display things.  So if you wanted to produce PostScript, then 
"all you have to do" is, when you're traversing your data structure(s),
produce PostScript calls instead.  For the most part, the requisite 
Xlib calls for a plotting program map pretty well to PostScript calls (being
vector-based), so it shouldn't be that much of a headache.

If you're going to use fonts for labeling axes and things....you're probably not
going to get a perfect duplicate of your screen, but it should be close if
you make some careful decisions on screen-fonts v.s. Postscript fonts.


-----
Frank G.


Of course, you could use NeWS and not even think about this problem.


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