[Chandler-dev] Printing

[Reid Ellis]

Hi everyone,

Jeffrey chatted with me yesterday and suggested that working on  
printing would be a more beneficial use of my remaining time, since  
it's an area in which nobody else has much expertise, whereas month  
view could be worked on by just about everyone. So after some checking  
with Grant and Katie, I'm putting aside the month view work for now  
and switching my focus to printing.


The two primary areas to get working are the detail view and the month  
view.

The month view is tricky because as of yet, the wx rendering class  
GraphicsContext does not have a proper printing back-end. There are  
plans for it, but it is not expected any time soon. A workaround is to  
render the month view to a bitmap and print *that*. To get good  
quality output, the bitmap needs to be large - ideally, the same  
resolution as the printed page. At a modest 600 dpi, an 8½x11" page is  
5,100 x 6,600 pixels. Using 24-bit pixels, that's 96 MB, which is a  
large bitmap for mst printers to handle, so printing it could be a bit  
slow.

The detail view will be handled by adding a new printing menu item in  
the File menu titled "Print Item Details", which will print the  
information in the detail view. This will be done by rendering it to  
an HTML view and printing that, which wxPython does quite nicely.


Meanwhile, I've checked in my latest month view changes to the  
month_rework branch. The code is at a point where it *should* be  
drawing multi-day events properly across the first week of their multi- 
dayness (I haven't done multi-week handling yet), but it isn't.

Reid