[Gnumed-devel] printing on Windows

[Sebastian Hilbert]

More bits on printing on Windows.

Most documents in GNUmed seem to be avaiable as pdf before they are being 
printed.

I believe we cannot rely on Adobe Reader being installed so we need to find 
another way. 

Here is a bit of code we might want to look at.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyQt4.QtGui import *

Appli=QApplication(sys.argv)
printer=QPrinter()
doc=QTextDocument("Hello" )
dialog = QPrintDialog(printer)
dialog.setModal(True)
dialog.setWindowTitle("Print Document" )

# dialog.addEnabledOption(QAbstractPrintDialog.PrintSelection)

if dialog.exec_() == True:
    doc.print_(printer)

What does it currently do ? It opens the printing dialog (tested on Linux) and 
prints out the text "Hello" on paper. I still have to test it on Windows.

Comments:
1.) It is done in PyQT. That is because I am not aware wxpython is capable of 
handling it the same way (yet). Let me know if that is not true.

http://wiki.wxpython.org/Printing

2.) The PyQT program could be converted to a standalone binary executable 
which means there needs to be no QT installation on the Windows PC

3.) I might need to be extended to accept command line arguments for e.g. 
printing to the default printer , printing to a pre-defined printer

4.) It could be used to return sane error codes so GNUmed will have useful 
feedback.

5.) It will be called from gm-print_doc.bat so there is no need to change the 
workflow.

6.) it needs code to support other input then text. This essentially means I 
need to look at how to pipe the pdf to it instead of text.

Sebastian