Talk:Pinstripe/Printer

Clarify?

What's a "point"? Smallest possible ink smudge? 1/72 inch? Also there are only two implementations, no consensus request, no notification, how did this task get out of draft? --Ledrug 23:59, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the smallest possible ink mark. The printers equivalent of a pixel. Markhobley 08:20, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure why the examples are marked as incorrect. They look ok to me, but I am not an expert on those languages, (and I have not tested them for operation). Markhobley 09:57, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Because both are using the "point" as in 1/72 of an inch, which decidedly is not the same as a smallest possible ink smudge. It is much more reasonable to do on a modern printer, because determining the smallest dot size of a printer reliably and portably is nontrivial, and printer languages such as PS and PCL exist precisely so people don't need to worry about this kind of things -- but, that's not what your task asks for. --Ledrug 23:24, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

In the tcl comments it reads "Send postscript to default printer, scaled 1 pixel -> 1 point". Isn't that achieving the goal? Or does the code not actually do what the comment says?

I am not familiar with PS or PCL. Do these go down to fractions of a point? Markhobley 23:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Don't printer drivers have the facility to return the smallest dot size or resolution information that we could use to calculate the smallest dot size? Markhobley 00:04, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

The TCL code, as far as I can see, is scaling 1 screen pixel to 1 pt on printout. 1pt is quite a bit larger than a smallest dot on modern printers. In general you can't tell what the smallest dot size is unless you know the exact printer model or you have a driver that knows that. Keeping track of all printer models and specs is nuts, let's ignore that. When you say "driver", a) a printer doesn't necessarily have a driver; b) it could be a generic postscript driver that knows nothing about device resolution; c) the printer might not be anywhere near your computer: what about network printers that expose only an http upload interface, for example? And, "printer resolution" is ill defined to begin with. Some printers boast say 2400 dpi resolution, but that's only when printing raster images with some clever halftoning trick, while the true resolution for a black dot may be only 600dpi. An inkjet printer has a fixed nozzle movement resolution, but each dot made by the nozzle depends highly on the ink and paper quality, which can be a much bigger smear. If your printer is one of those ancient analog x-y plotter, its resolution may be solely determined by how worn out its stylus tip is, no driver can help you with that.

As I said before, in modern printers, you generally don't (and can't) worry about resolution as long as it's good enough. I'm not sure what kind of printer you had in mind with this task, but have the feeling that the task is not really thought through. Which leads to my other question: how is this task not a draft? --Ledrug 02:07, 9 July 2011 (UTC)