Re: Request for arbitrary n-by-m printing setup.

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 05:36 PM 2/27/2002 -0600, Daniel Joyce wrote:
>         Okay, after sturggling to make business cards with a graphic in 
> them, and
>finding that embedding a placefigure inside a frame inside a combination
>yields inconsistent and unfixable results (1), I finally got it working
>using combinations, frames, and figuretext. Figuretext is less flexible
>than placefigure, but fixes the problem mention in (1), IE, the weird
>tabbing down/over of other placefigures.
>
>         1) Fix placefigure so it works inside combination, and other 
> placefigures.
>externalgraphic does work inside combinations, buuut, you can't have
>laid-out out text inside a external graphic... Maybe I should try
>tex-graphics?

\startbuffer
   some text
\stopbuffer

\externalgraphic[buffer][width=4cm]

should work

>         2) Allow arbitrary n-by-m pagesetups for printing. Businesscards 
> come out
>as punchouts 2 wide by 5 deep on a US letter page. If I could define a
>'business' card page and then lay them out for printing on such a page, I
>would have had to use the frame/combination kludge. As it is, I had to
>define a frame 3.5x2 inches, put my text & graphics in that, then put the
>frames inside a combination. Works, but it's messy.

\setuppapersize[A8][A4]
\setuplayout[nx=4,ny=4]

\starttext

\input tufte

\stoptext

>         (1) By unfixable, the very first text/graphic would be layed out 
> properly
>inside the combination, but all the others would be moved down or over a
>set amount. What's funny is the frames would stay put, but the
>text/graphics inside would be moved down/out of the frames! Frames don't
>seem to contain their contents very well. No amount of twiddling with
>combination, frames, or placefigure settings fixed this.  Frames also don't
>seem to 'wrap' their contents very well. I needed the frame because I
>needed it to make sure that each part of the 2*5 combination was exactly
>3.5x2inches so it'd match up with the perfs.

this is because placefigure floats! so, don't use \place... inside a box

         Showboxes is apparently bust wrt to the above too. Turning 
showboxes on
>with any combo of combinations/frames/figures results in the boxes being
>shown, but also clobbers the actual layout. Everything gets moved around.
>Defeats the purpose, no?

since the visual debugger overloads primitives, it will fail in situations 
where unboxing and alike takes place, no way out

Hans
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