Future feature -- "one button fancy printing"?

[Herbert Sitz]

One feature I'd like in VO would be ability to quickly and easily get high-quality printed output.  Adding this feature would necessarily be dependent on external scripts and applications, so adding it would require adopting some sort of standard application set.

In short, what I want to do is, within VO, have a command for high quality printing, e.g.,  ':hqprint'.  Actually, we  might as well have another one to print to pdf instead of hard copy: ":hqprint2pdf".

That command would save the current file, run any scripts necessary to process the VO text format into format needed by the print application, then call (but not show on screen) the printing application (e.g., Lyx) and have it send the output to the printer.  Although it would depend on a lot of external stuff, once set up it would effectively give us high quality printing from within VO.  A user would not need to have any idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

I think most of the pieces are already there right now.  Some of you already go through a multi-step process of your own to prepare and print high quality output of VO outlines.  All that needs to be done is decide on a default way of doing it (which could allow of some variations) and automate it in way that can be triggered and/or controlled from vimscript.

Basically it's just following the Unix way to implement VO printing.  Could also be made to work without too much tweaking on Windows, too, though.

Just throwing it out there. . .

-- Herb

[David J Patrick-2]

Herbert Sitz wrote:
> One feature I would very much like in VO would be ability to quickly and
> easily get high-quality printed output.
Agreed 100%, as it doesn't matter how clear your idea is, as a text
file, if the output looks like .. excrement. Typesetting is _required_
for the reader to fully absorb the content.
   Adding this feature would
> necessarily be dependent on external scripts and applications, so adding it
> would require adopting some sort of standard application set.
my path to print is currently
vo > otl2aft.awk
.aft > .tex, with selectable styles
.tex > .pdf via pdflatex
print

>
> In short, what I want to do is, within VO, have a command for high quality
> printing, e.g.,  ':hqprint'.

I'm working towards;
:ha #default hardcopy output, user configurable
:ha book #output using book, chapter, section, subsection styles
:ha memo
:ha hipster
:ha refcard
:ha blog (html)
and I intend to develop each one until satisfied, and then never think
about style again. mostly,

I'm using sitz-style metadata for that too, so that I can build monster
outlines where sub-parts can be assigned default styles. For example,

MyBigPile
        : {author:David J Patrick}
        : {title: An Enormous Dung-heap of Data}
        : This book is so important because bla bla bla
        A fascinating sub-part
                : {style:refcard}
                Scintillating sub-sub-part

in theory, if I just hit
:ha , I will end up with full-page pdf.
:ha book would make a 8.5 x 5.5 book style with index and all
but if I went to the Fascinating heading and ,,hoisted, _then_ hit
:ha , the initial awk script would sent that part out as a refcard,
when before, it was part of the book. Metadata is, of course, not
printed in either case.

sounds confusing, shouldn't be.
>
> I think most of the pieces are already there right now.  Some of you already
> go through a multi-step process of your own to prepare and print high
> quality output of VO outlines.  All that needs to be done is decide on a
> default way of doing it (which could allow of some variations) and automate
> it in way that can be triggered or processed by vimscript.

very much needed, and I thought I was going to have to do it on my own.
>
> Just throwing it out there. . .
got it!
djp
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