Prop Tool IDE - printing suggestion
CounterRotatingProps
Posts: 1,132
For old eye's like mine, it's nice to print out documentation.
Unless I've not found all the options, toggling print settings-> Color print doesn't prevent the background from·printing in·color (you know, VAR, PUB, etc ) - in fact, toggling Color print off makes the printout look pretty goofy as in white text·blocks on a colored background.
But what is more an issue is when you print B/W - regardless of that·color print setting -·because you get all the color fill as grey scale - which wastes a lot of toner.··
Perhaps in the next release, you could add a option to drop the background color?
thanks,
- Howard in Florida
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Unless I've not found all the options, toggling print settings-> Color print doesn't prevent the background from·printing in·color (you know, VAR, PUB, etc ) - in fact, toggling Color print off makes the printout look pretty goofy as in white text·blocks on a colored background.
But what is more an issue is when you print B/W - regardless of that·color print setting -·because you get all the color fill as grey scale - which wastes a lot of toner.··
Perhaps in the next release, you could add a option to drop the background color?
thanks,
- Howard in Florida
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Comments
-Phil
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Nyamekye,
-Phil
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Nyamekye,
@SLRM: yeah, but as Phil mentions, it Bjorks up the formatting in several ways. Besides, this is the kind of stuff that computers are supposed to make easier for us <G>. The few iterations of programming that little check box saves the rest of us multiple repeats.
@Phil and Nyamekye: yes, I hadn't thought about other more important things... maybe this thread will morph into a PropTool IDE suggestion box?
Although Viewport's a (super!) third-party product, I'd like to see them more tightly coupled. The IDE could present interface hooks that would allow it to embed in other products. I'll bet, however, that would be a *major* rewrite.
Yes, the lack of sub dirs is just dorky.
I'll toss in my vote for a preprocessor too... spin/asm Macros would be cool ... better yet, embed a scripting language, like LUA, jscript, vbscript, or even dare I say PERL or Python? " PropPy " would be very amazing...
cheers
- Howard
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The PRE section is basically just a batch file, where %1 is the original Spin code, and %2 is the preprocessed code. Having it would preclude the necessity of developing an entirely new IDE/text editor on one's own. As many forum regulars know, I've been lobbying hard for such a feature for a long time now but have failed to raise a public response from the two people who can make it happen.
-Phil
If you wait until you get all the features in, you never ship the software. Can you imagine the support nightmare of preprocessor hooks? Even if you explicitly stated that there is zero support for them you will still get E-mails like "It won't work with M4 v6.123" because someone forgot to read the docs or there is a bug in the other code. It just becomes unmanageable.
If you want a specific feature, write an IDE and implement it [noparse]:)[/noparse]
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Eccles : How do I open the door?
Bluebottle : You turn the knob on your side
Eccles : I haven't got a knob on my side!
Jeff T.
On the contrary: I see preprocessor hooks as a nearly ideal way to quell the rising demand for features that a preprocessor could easily support (e.g. macros, more expressive array constructors and dereferencing, etc.). In my mind, it's the best way to offload onto the user base a ton of pent-up feature demand and free up limited assets for Prop II development. Parallax can't do it all themselves, but there's a lot of willing talent afield that can, given the right tools. This would be the right tool.
-Phil
#preproc /usr/bin/m4
And the compiler passes that particular lump of text sans the #preproc directive to the pre-processor stdin, takes the stdout of the preprocessor and compiles it.
Now, while that is achievable, what do you do about Unicode? At the moment unicode is pre-processed into a straight 8-bit "ASCII-alike" and passed to the compiler (to remain compatible with the behaviour of the Parallax compiler). Do you munge the unicode before the pre-processor? How do you pass UTF-16 in a stream? Do we convert to UTF-8? Do we refuse to pre-process if you have non-ASCII in your file?
Doing it that way removes the dependence on the system shell and a number of installation specific variables. The Propeller tool can compile files not saved to disk. Using temporary files just removes so much of the in-built elegance of having the compiler built into the IDE. Using pipes allows you to retain that and also means you don't have to parse and substitute file names on your pre-processor command line.
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Eccles : How do I open the door?
Bluebottle : You turn the knob on your side
Eccles : I haven't got a knob on my side!
To solve your problem with the background color printing, just go to Edit/Preferences and select the Appearance tab. Under Syntax Highlighting Scheme change from Spin to None or Simple. The None setting will allow you to print out everything in black text, with no background color. The Simple setting will allow you to print all code in black, and all comments in blue, again with no background color. When you are done printing you can set the Syntax Highlighting Scheme back to Spin to return to the multicolored code blocks.
Leonard
I think the Unicode issue is solvable. The bigger question, I believe, is what to do about compile errors. The preprocessor will have to provide a way to refer an error back to the original source line that spawned it (assuming the error isn't the fault of the preprocessor itself). But, again, this is solvable, and it's time for Parallax to join this conversation.
-Phil
1.Open Preferences
2.Click on Appearances tab
3.Select Scheme: Spin
4. Click copy, click yes
5. In Elements, click the + next to blocks
6. For each block, type 0 for the Alternate Bg and click on the color square right above it. Select white.
I've attached a sample print. It preserves the syntax boldfacing.