Re: No-frills print to label printer help please (Rick Mann)

FROM : David Phillip Oster
DATE : Sun May 25 22:40:10 2008

At Sun, 25 May 2008 10:42:26 -0700, No-frills print to label printer
help please (Rick Mann):
>
>I'm writing a small app to print labels. Currently I'm targeting a
>Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo (a little USB printer) using a small 2.3" X
>4" label. I created a view in my app that uses that aspect ratio (I
>have yet to find out the printer's actual resolution) at about 315 X
>182. I draw a number of NSStrings in the view at different sizes and
>fonts.
>
>My first pass at a print routing just calls
>
>    [[NSPrintOperation printOperationWithView: mLabelView] runOperation];
>
>and it prints, but presents the print dialog and shows a tiny version
>of my view in the center of the page with the wrong orientation (if I
>select "scale to fit paper size" in the Paper Handling section of the
>print dialog; if I don't select "Scale to fit paper size," it shoots
>out one blank label).
>
>What I want is for my view to scale to fit the entire label, rotated
>to print wide, and i don't want the user to have to deal with the
>print dialog. There will be hundreds of individual labels being
>printed, but all in the same fashion. (There will be a pref for
>setting the printer/label size one time.)
>
>I'm still reading through the printing docs, but maybe someone can
>point me to the specific things I need to look at to do this right?
>I'm sure there are many ways. For example, I could get the page size
>from the print info record, make the view that size, rotate my text
>and draw. But it seems like there should be an easier way to have my
>view rotated and scaled to fit the page (programmatically).
>
>TIA,
>--
>Rick


See my posting on a similar topic, print resolution:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.programmer.help/msg/a6136ac7893b54f9

If you don't want a print dialog, call: [printOp setShowPanels:NO];

If you want to set the print information once: a NSPrintInfo obeys
the NSCoding protocol, so you can saved it to a file using
NSkeyedArchiver, and restore it with NSKeyedUnarchiver.

If the user didn't set the correct portrait versus landscape mode,
you can set an NSAffineTransform at the beginning of your drawRect,
and it will handle the rotation for you.