Unimplemented: opx.printer

[tomsci]

Eg https://archive.org/download/3-libjune-05/3LIBJUNE05.iso/library%2Fepocmisc%2Fatmos5%2Fatmos522.SIS

Print operations are unlikely to ever be supported, unless someone wants to send me a working psion5 compatible printer to test with...

[jbmorley]

I wonder if it would help to stub this out?

[kapfab]

Were there many third-party OPL apps that supported printing? A few banking apps maybe?

[jbmorley]

Good question. I've no clue at this point. I'm currently stuck in the middle of a refactor of the software index importer, but as soon as I've done that I'm going to start pulling out information about which OPXs are used, etc.

[tomsci]

Were there many third-party OPL apps that supported printing? A few banking apps maybe?

I think this is the first one I've come across, and printers weren't that common hooked up to Psions in the first place I don't think.

I wonder if it would help to stub this out?

I stubbed out ResetPrinting() which was enough to get atmos to at least not crash when showing the menu.

[jbmorley]

You know, if we've got no printing to reset, it sounds a lot like you've fully implemented ResetPrinting().

[kapfab]

I think this is the first one I've come across, and printers weren't that common hooked up to Psions in the first place I don't think.

Well, Psions came with Canon Bubblejet, HP Deskjet and LaserJet drivers and there were third-party PCL and Postscript drivers so that made quite a lot of printers compatible. And later came PDFPrinter to print as PDF. And printing was also possible via PC (PsiWin / plptools).
However, I can't remember me printing with third-party apps, only Psion's stock apps.

[jbmorley]

PDFPrinter would be interesting as on iOS we could actually use that to bring up a print screen.

@kapfab Do you remember how the PDF stuff actually worked under the hood and how the platform provided support for it (assuming it did)?

[kapfab]

It was a specific printer driver developed by the same author as PDF+, he reimplemented the whole PDF generation stack, translating the printing instructions into a PDF, directly on the Psion.
The printing stack in Opolua (if you ever decide to implement it) should also be independent from any driver and translate the printer.opx configuration and drawing calls into a PDF (or something else, but PDF seems the most practical and cross-platform option IMHO).

[jbmorley]

Yeah. That makes sense. I imagine we'd have to do something from scratch if we went that way. Oh well, not for today, that's for sure. 🙃