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Paper-based reports
Paper continues to play an essential role for meeting materials and reports.
Fortunately, ploticus can create attractive data displays on paper,
using vector graphics and PoscScript fonts, and control over page layout
and pagination.
Pre-press work
This is discussed
here.
Supported printer languages
Ploticus can generate paginated PostScript or
Encapsulated PostScript (EPS).
Use the -ps command line option to get paginated PostScript;
use -eps for EPS.
Paginated PostScript may be sent directly to printers and
may contain multiple pages. EPS generally contains one picture or figure;
it may be printed directly or it may be imported by other software applications.
Image import
Another way to work is to create PNG,
SVG
, or GIF files with ploticus,
and import these into your document.
Considerations
Here are some issues that come into play with paper-based reports:
Color: paper-based reports must often must be in monochrome
due to photocopying limitations. A background color of white
gives the best results.
Printers convert colors to grays
but results may not be quite what you would expect.
Foreground and background colors may be controlled from proc page
or from the command line.
When creating EPS, the default background is transparent.
When printing results directly,
graphs may need to be layed out properly with respect to
standard-sized sheets of paper.
Proc areadef includes several different methods for
specifying layout geometry.
Paper orientation is the way the paper is held. Paper may be portrait (tall)
or landscape (oblong). Orientation may be set in proc page
or on the command line.
Pagination - a single script file may generate multiple pages of results.
In pl, proc page is used to specify a page break.
