a possible way forward ? - after Cologne 2017 !

[FFF]

Phil, looking forward to see your results

It really is easy to get them to produce nice results, without the need to know just how half of the methods actually work, or what they do - many methods just provide a technical service to other more common sense methods - but they are totally required for printing success.

Two remarks: placing text in the "@x, y"-mm relative to paperbounds style is still needed (just in case you shouldn't know this <g,d&r>, and:
putting all helper code in separate lib, at least separate folder, or better, in a parent class should keep the dev-user frontend small & tidy.

HAND
Karl

[wriedmann]

Hi Phil,

I'll look forward to your samples!

I'm using a 3rd party library in VO, tha gives me only a virtual printer and the possibility to render graphic elements and texts including RTF on a predefined surface, and over this library (written in C++) I have added my own report classes, that evaluates code from my applications and uses text-based report files.
The 3rd party tool (VPE from Ideal Software) is not open source (but there is a free and somewhat limited version available), and since I wrote the first interface over it, I was offering my own classes source code to everyone that was interested.

Of course, if there is something better I can switch (or better: use another tool for future prints). So I look forward to you samples.

Wolfgang

[robert]

Phil,

I think Printing is a great topic for the conference. Most developers that I have met dislike creating reports, and customers love to have reports, so it is a good opportunity to make some extra money, when you have the right tools.

Having a tool that makes creating the reports easy is certainly helpful. Especially if you can also explain a little bit about what is happening "behind the scenes" so we understand the code

I have a meeting in 10 days with Meinhard, Maike and Michael (M&M&M, is that a coincidence?) to discuss next year's conference. I am sure we will discuss this as well.

Robert

[Phil Hepburn]

Hi Karl,

I never thought of that - putting all the support methods in a separate entity so as to simplify the 'user class', in a sort of 'front-end' class.

Any more good ideas where that came from ? :whistle:

Now time to get some sleep.

Speak again soon,
Regards,
Phil.