[texworks] TeX-Works-Workflow: printing?

[David Perry]

Stefan,

Thank you for the clear explanation of the printing issue.  (I did not 
doubt that there were good reasons why it hadn't been implemented yet.)

Since people are now getting print-enabled versions of TW through MiKTeX 
(2.8, moving to 2.9), it might be good to add a simple explanation of 
this issue to Alain's manual and perhaps elsewhere (maybe the MiKTeX 
folks would add it to their help files).  Nothing fancy, just something 
like: "The software used to create TW is designed to work on all 
operating systems.  This presents some problems when printing the PDF 
output on Windows.  The version of TW supplied with MiKTeX will print 
PDFs, but the quality depends on the particular printer being used.  If 
the printouts direct from TW are not satisfactory, you can use one of 
the various PDF readers to get higher quality printing."

On 10/17/2010 3:59 AM, Stefan Löffler wrote:

> So, ultimately it depends on the printer (driver) you use whether you
> get good results or crappy print-outs. This (to the user) seemingly
> random behavior is not good ;).
Unless a person owns more than one printer, the quality will either be 
good or not.  In my case, I was testing on an HP printer; if many or 
most HP drivers support the postscript passthrough, that's a lot of 
folks right there who will be able to print.  So I think it's good to 
have printing enabled in MiKTeX despite the problem (see suggestion above).

> So, ultimately, we'd need some extensive changes to poppler - or a
> different pdf rendering library - to reasonably implement printing.
Difficult problem, clearly.  But here's my take: I see a lot of effort 
being expended on scripting and now we're talking about project 
management.  All this is more fun than wrestling with an intractable 
problem like printing.  But go back to that new user.  No printing?? 
 From a sort of common-sense point of view it would seen desirable to 
solve this very basic problem before moving to higher-level stuff (not 
that I object to enhancements for experienced users).  I don't mean to 
minimize the difficulties, but it sounds like putting this off won't 
solve anything (unless the Poppler folks have announced that they are 
working on new versions that will address the problem).  My 2 cents.

Final thought: is it possible to get a sense of what percentage of 
printer drivers do work with Stefan's patch?  If, let's say, 70-80% of 
them work, I would not think it necessary to try to find a complete 
solution for printing, given the difficulties.  Telling 20 or 30% of 
Windows users to switch to their PDF viewer is much better than telling 
everyone to, although of course not ideal.

David