Print Spool to PDF

[TimGrun]

Hi

Within a program, I would like to be able to print the spool to a pdf file. Currently, "print spoolname" prints the spool to the default printer.

If eviews 7 will not be able to print directly to a pdf file, can options be added to the print command to specify the print device and destination and possibly other print options?

Thanks,
Tim

[EViews Gareth]

We're investigating changing the printer in a program. However it isn't clear to me that this will help you much. Most of the PDF making printer drivers that I know of will pop up a second dialog/interface asking you questions about the file you want to make whenever you print to them. There is no way that EViews could control these dialogs/interfaces, so even if you were able to print a spool to a PDF in a program, you still wouldn't be able to automate the process completely.

[startz]

There is an open source program to create pdfs that can be run a COM-object. I wonder if this might help at some point.

[TimGrun]

Ok, I see that the paradigm for creating pdfs in the windows environment is to use a pdf printer driver.
Supplying defaults to the printer driver, such as printer device, destination file name, and spool size would minimize mistakes made by users of our programs.

Graphs can be saved as postscript files, why can't spools?

Thanks,
Tim

We're investigating changing the printer in a program. However it isn't clear to me that this will help you much. Most of the PDF making printer drivers that I know of will pop up a second dialog/interface asking you questions about the file you want to make whenever you print to them. There is no way that EViews could control these dialogs/interfaces, so even if you were able to print a spool to a PDF in a program, you still wouldn't be able to automate the process completely.

[EViews Gareth]

Sending information to the printer driver is not really going to work - how would we know what printer driver each user has, and how would we support every printer driver out there?

[TimGrun]

Two more questions:

1. The R language and latex are able to create pdf files from within programs. That might be worth looking into.

2. Eview's charts can create postscript files. Can Eview's create postscript files from a spool file?

Thanks again,
Tim

[EViews Gareth]

Currently, no.