Hey!!! LisaGUI now has Printing!
This post is just the (lightly edited) text of a document I created for the sole purpose of having something to print out from LisaGUI to advertise its ability to print documents. Printing it gave me something I could photograph and shove into my blog and social media accounts to further drive the point home. Wow! It's so self-referential, just reading this must be making your head spin!
You can now print documents directly from LisaGUI! LisaType supports this feature; just go to the File/Print menu and click "Print As Is". LisaGUI will direct your web browser to print out a document using the settings from the "Format for Printer" dialog (this is regardless of whether the "Wrap to Window" option is checked). I'm working on a few more options which will be available in a "print" dialog, but I just wanted to get this update to you as soon as I could.
Another feature of note I'd like to mention is you can now set the pixel aspect ratio of a LisaType document. The default option is to match the setting in the preferences app. Changing this setting means changing how many pixels the margins take up. It also means changing the actual physical height of the font; a 1:2 ratio will appear vertically stretched when printed, while 1:1 will look squished.
This setting changes the pagination of the document, and it will be more important once I get around to adding image embedding in LisaType. You may want to design a document so it always appears in, say, a pixel aspect ratio of 3:4. Well, now you can! I will grant, most people probably won't change this setting, but it seems like something I ought to provide if I'm gonna give people the ability to change the aspect ratio in the first place. The options available are those in the Preferences app's "Configure Display" pane.
I suppose now's a great time to reflect on how fortunate it was that the Macintosh, released one year after the Lisa, used square pixels, meaning we don't need to deal with this issue in all of the modern computing systems which take after it. Working around this issue has been an interesting part of working on LisaGUI. The pixel aspect ratio is a characteristic of the Lisa I feel bridges the gap between older, text-mode operating systems (where the ratio varied greatly, and fonts were designed to be stretched in a variety of different proportions) and the modern, square pixels we take for granted.
Now, if you're under a certain age and were born with a silver iPad in your mouth, you might have some questions in response to this post, like "what's printing?" Well, you see, there used to be this thing called "paper" on which people would make marks consisting of various strokes and dots which, when combined, formed these things called "letters." The letters were chained together into "words," and the words were grouped together into things called "paragraphs." People would draw these marks onto the paper, and others would look at them. This was called "reading."
To make the marks, they used handheld tools like pencils, which made graphite marks, and pens, which saturated parts of the paper with ink. By the late 19th century, we had these mechanical devices called "typewriters" which people were using to make marks, because it was faster than the handheld tools. And by the mid-20th century, we had invented these magic electronic devices called "computers" which allowed us to reliably type up many, many words at high speeds. We could then make the marks representing those words all at once using something called a "printer." And the rest is history.
You might have other questions too, like "what is reading," and I guess my response would be "how did you get to this part of the document if you're even asking that question?" I guess it's just one of those unknown truths of the universe which will be forever locked away from us...
Anyway, I'm running out of things to type into this document. I thought it was funny and clever to poke fun at gen-z, but the bit has worn off by now. I guess I should wrap this up with some kind of conclusion. I don't know. Maybe just like the post and follow me on Bsky and Mastodon for more updates. I do see every time someone follows me. It means a lot...