PuTTY wish cooked-printer

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summary: Feature-rich printer support with formatting control
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: mdpi
blocks: print-screen
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.

Improved ANSI printer control support. Squirting raw data out to a random printer is all very well for people who already have their remote application configured with a driver for their specific printer, but not ideal if you just want to send a text file and have it print in a sensible sort of way. I'd like an alternative printing mode using the Windows graphical printing API (where the printing application has to draw on the page like a canvas), doing the layout myself. Advantages include being able to guarantee the right number of columns and rows per page, being able to let the user select portrait/landscape, and possibly also doing some escape-sequence parsing on the input data stream to handle a variety of simple control codes (DEC/ANSI and PCL both spring to mind, and I think the simple ones of these could both be supported at once without clashes requiring user-level configuration).

This is certainly going to be a large piece of code, so if it happens at all it will want to be a plugin DLL using the plugin interface.

In the meantime, if you have something which will emulate your favourite printer language (e.g. Ghostscript for Postscript), you can try bolting it on to PuTTY with something like RedMon.

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2002-05-10 00:29:22 +0000)