Re: Setup linewidth for Laserwriter

[Vincent Keunen <nrb!keunen@nrbmi2.ia.nrb.be>]

    Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1993 00:22+0200
    From: "Mark A. Tapia" <markt@dgp.toronto.edu>

    On Sat Jan 30 07:09:30 1993 Martin Emele writes:
	Does anyone know how to change the default linewidth setup for
	printing on a laserwriter. I'm using Mark A. Tapia's print-u.lisp
	utility for printing a PICT graphic on a Laserwriter IIg. I set the
	Quickdraw pensize to #@(1 1) and it looks fine on the screen even
	after scaling but if I print it on the Laserwriter the lines show up
	as thick lines (probably 1 point lines).
    Martin describes a typical problem with "displaying" graphics on 
    devices with different resolutions. When using Quckdraw, there appears
    to be no way to "draw" a line that is less than one pixel wide.
    For a standard Mac screen this is 1/72".  This is a limitation of
    Quickdraw which does not occur in PostScript.

    One way to make the change is to specify that the picture is being drawn
    at a scale of 4*75 pixels per linear inch. Another is to issue all the
    drawing commands for lines as if the document were 4x its real size
    and then forcing a print reduction of 25%. Lines drawn at 1 pixel in the
    in the enlargement will be roughly 1/4 the size in the "printed" version.

    mark

If you have lots of complex printing, you might consider getting CLIM
(Common Lisp Interface Manager) for MCL.  It has a full drawing
substrate and anything that you can do with clim drawing functions can
be wrapped by a "with-output-to-postscript-stream" that will generate
the postscript file for you.  You have a lot more options with that.
Moreover, CLIM is not device specific, you can work in any resolution
you want.  (you will also get cross-platform portability, but you will
lose the mac specifics like quicktime, applescript,...).

Vincent
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Keunen Vincent                  Network Research Belgium
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