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Right now I hate printing and I hate Delphi and I hate printers.
Most printers we have at the office are smart. You hand it an 8.5"x11"
thing-to-be-printed and it says, "Oh, that's letter-sized paper, which is
in tray 2, so I;ll use that," and everyone's happy.
I now have to deal with one that's dumb. It must be told which tray to
use, for it it a simple printer and cannot figure these things out on its
own. So my program must offer the user a choice of available trays and
then pass that choice to the printer. And I can do that for some things,
though I have to muck with the Windows API because Borland didn't feel
like adding support in its TPrinter object.
But I also use Quick Reports (comes with Delphi), and while it has a Tray
setting, it's a predefined enumeration for which there's no good
on-the-fly mapping to the actual printer's trays. And no way to provide
arbitrary input on sending to arbitrary trays. I also have to print
through Word. Its OLE interface doesn't seem to have any provision for
tray selection. Hooray for not having standards.
Hate, hate, hate.
--
...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/
PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2
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"Dad, what makes wind?"
"Trees sneezing."
-- Calvin and his dad ("Calvin & Hobbes")
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