Documentation/Printing

This document is supposed to be a short guide of adding paged output to NetSurf. Currently the two pieces of code using the print implementation are PDF export and GTK printing.

printer.h

The first thing the new paged output has to do is implementing the printer interface located in printer.h. It consists of four elements:

• plotter. This are the plotters which will be used while redrawing the content.
• print_begin. This function is called right after the set up and should manage all the remaining user-specific initialisation stuff.
• print_next_page. This function is called before the actual printing of each page allowing to prepare the content to be printed.
• print_end. This function is called right before the printing routines clean after themselves and should be used for saving the output to a file, freeing previously allocated memory, relesing document handles etc.

print.h

The provided print interface consists of a set of functions which can be used seperately and one integrating them all making the print a matter of one call. If it is enough you can just call print_basic_run and wait for it to return. However, for the case you can't accompish the printing task this way the print interface gives you the possiblity of calling the print steps individually.

Only if you are using print_basic_run you can omit specifying the print settings. If this is the case the default ones will be used.

As you will notice the functions correspond to those you had to implement in the printer. The reason for this is adding some flexibility to the system which occured necessary i.e in the GTK print implementation.

• print_set_up. This sets the printing system up and calls print_begin
• print_draw_next_page. Here after calling print_next_page one full page of the dimensions given in the print settings is plotted
• print_cleanup. This function is responsible for freeing all used resources right after calling print_end

Settings

This is where the besic information about the print job is held. You can use one of the predifined sets(DEFAULT and OPTIONS) or add your own. In order to do that you have to follow this steps:

• add your entry to the print_configuration enum
• add handling of it to the switch in print_make_settings
• add the entry name to this document

NetSurf Code Documentation
Organization and Conventions	Modular coding style Directory structure Error handling Memory management
Features	Content handling Layout engine Frames Printing Treeview
Platform-specifics	Front end functions Caveat RISC OS GTK interface
References	References