[APBeta] Finder Chart Printing

[Paul Rodman]

On May 27, 2011, at 5:02 PM, Michael Portuesi wrote:

> I finally got a chance to sit down and fully explore the new finder chart printing features in 2.0, as I'm preparing some charts for observing over Memorial Day weekend.
> 
> The AP 2.0 finder chart feature is really quite impressive.  Kudos for such a powerful, configurable and flexible chart printing mechanism!
> 
> One thing I did notice.
> 
> When I generated a PDF from the charts, I discovered the chart printouts are actually rendered to PDF as a giant bitmap, and not as vectors.  So if you zoom in onscreen, the lines and star graphics pixelate.
> 
> I went back and checked a sample PDF generated by 1.6, and noticed it also rendered the charts as bitmaps.  One difference is that text headers were rendered with true outline fonts on 1.6, but even the text is bitmap in 2.0.  Is this a change with the compiler framework?
> 
> For paper printouts, this won't make any difference.  It only potentially becomes an issue when the PDF charts are loaded on a device like an iPad or Android tablet.  I'd like to give that a try, so I'll see how well these new charts zoom on the tablet screen.

In order to use scripting to create the print preview, I was forced* to render the pages as lossless images at the same resolution as the selected printer (with an upper limit to keep the image file sizes reasonable). Those (bitmap) images are then used to show the preview and render the pages to the printer.

With direct printing from a script, the page is rendered directly to the printer, and hence is maximum resolution.

Paul R.

* "forced" as in: the only other solutions required a lot of time and money to implement. Ideally, the print preview would be rendered to, say, a postscript or PDF document, which would allow fast and unlimited resolution printing. This might be be doable on Mac OS X, but requires a lot of jumping through hoops on the "other" OS.