[Lazarus] Printing a formatted page

[Dave Coventry]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 7:24 PM, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
> What do you need? Just the size of the paper?
The whole lot.
I want to write a letter to someone who's name is in a database.
So It's got to say:
Dear $Title $Firstname $Surname, Re yours of the inst. $Date etc, ect.
(I'm just using Perl variables to show the structure of the letter -
obviously in Pascal you don't preface variables with $)

Also to print out Invioces and Reciepts.

It's actually for Student registration, letters of acceptance, Courses
taken, price of each course, etc...

> If you are using "normal" paper, you can let LCL calculate the size >by simply giving the paper name to it:
Mostly just A4 pages.


> You will have a lot of difficulty to communicate with OpenOffice.
Yes, I realise that. I've had a look at the format of OpenOffice
documents and I think it would not be trivial to convert such a
document into a format that I could use to print a page with
TPrinter.Canvas. That's why I was thinking of Postscript and PCL.

> What is PCL?
PCL = Printer Control Language (IIRC)
It used to be the language to control old style plottters (with up to
eight pens!), and I think it was an IBM standard.

> I am building a CNC Machine, and I also need to read data from
> an external software. I analised Postscript and I arrived to the
> conclusion that it is too complex to build a Postscript interpreter
> (Postscript is a full programming language!).
Yeah, I know! I did a lot of work in Postscript some years ago, but I
don't remember enough about it to confidently try and convert a PS
file. The problem is that it uses a lot of recursion and popping and
pushing functions onto a stack so that it becomes quite complicated to
read.

However, a lot of people have done a lot of stuff with PS, so I was
hoping there was something out there I could use...

> We have decided now to build a PDF reading library for Free
> Pascal. We should start working on it in a few months.
Good luck!