The TypeSetter Tool
In the glorious future, Tioga will have an interactive typesetter that will let you make incremental revisions to a typeset document to adjust pagination, page layout, and other details before actually printing it. Work has started on this, but until it's available, the current typesetter will do a more than adequate job of letting you print your files.
The TSetter tool provides a convenient way of driving the Tioga typesetter. Start it up by typing "TSetter" to the executive. The typesetter icon will come up showing the name of the print server it is "connected" to; this name can be specified in your profile under the heading "Hardcopy.PressPrinter", or as the first argument on the command line.
The remainder of the command line is taken as a list of file names to be printed. If this list is non-empty and the files are succesfully printed before you touch any of the tool's buttons, the tool will quietly go away.
When you open the typesetter icon, you will see the menu
Pause Stop StopSending Get Print All < Screen > New
plus a fill-in field labeled "Documents:". The normal way to use the typesetter is to select the viewer or file name, and click "Get" to add the document name to the queue. Then click "Print" to start the typesetter up; if all goes well, the only other thing you have to do next is to walk over to the printer and pick up your output.
You can put several documents in the queue before starting up the typesetter, and go do something else while it is working away. The queue is shown after the "Documents:" button and is in fact editable; it is a good idea to click "Pause" before editing, though, to keep the typesetter from taking the queue out from under you. Clicking "All" instead of "Print" funnels the whole queue into one big press file, which avoids a lot of header pages if you want to print many small files.
To print the bitmap on the screen, use the "Screen" button. The "<" button will print just the left half of the screen, the ">" the right. The half-screen output may be printed on a Spruce printer (e.g., Clover or Menlo) if it is not too complicated; otherwise, use a full Press printer (such as Stinger, Quoth, or Lilac).
Hitting "Stop" will bring the typesetter to a halt.
Hitting "StopSending" will abort any transmission to a print server.
Destroying a tool will not stop it; it will just finish running and then go away.
If you try to typeset a press file, it will just get sent to the server without modification. After it is successfully transmitted, it will be deleted if its name ends in a "$".
To make a TSetter tool that sends its output to a different place, type the server name somewhere, select it, and click "New". If the selection is less than two characters long, the resulting tool will be called "TSetter", and will just create a press file without trying to send it anywhere. The name of the press file is generated by appending ".press" to the input file name, unless the input file had a name of the form "xxx.tioga"; in the latter case the press file will be named just "xxx.press". It is OK to run multiple typesetter tools at the same time.
If you want to print multiple copies, change the "Copies" field near the bottom of the TSetter viewer. This number is reset to 1 after each file is transmitted to a server, to keep you from wasting a lot of paper by forgetting to reset it.
The "Temporary Press Files" button is followed by a Boolean value. If this is TRUE, the typesetter will create press files with names that end in "$", so that they will be deleted after they are successfully transmitted. Clicking the button toggles the Boolean. The initial setting of this flag is controlled by the user profile entry "Hardcopy.TemporaryPressFiles".
The feedback from the typesetter tool is logged. You can see the log by making the tool bigger and scrolling the appropriate subwindows. The top subwindow is for the formatting process and the bottom subwindow is for the spooling process.
Multiple column and landscape output is now possible. Look at [Indigo]<Cedar>Styles>*Print.style to see if there is a style there that will let you do what you want. If not, let TiogaImplementors^.PA know. (You are welcome to try writing your own print styles, but be warned that they may not work in the future, as incompatible changes in this mechanism are planned.) As an example, you can get two column landscape output by making a style that has in it just the following:
BeginStyle
(Cedar) AttachStyle
(TwoColumnLandscapePrint) AttachStyle
EndStyle
and setting this little style on your document. (For now, you must make sure all the styles you need are on your disk.)
Mark Properties
To implement running headers and footers, the TSetter "marks" special Tioga nodes. These marked nodes are later used for page layout purposes. In fact, the entire branch descendant from a marked node is retained. Caution is advised that text nodes are not inadvertenly nested under a marked node.
Marked nodes have a Mark property value which is a rope name. The present set of known mark property values is established by the page layout styles, e.g. BasicPrint.Style. No checking is done on mark property values, so they may seem to disappear when the document is printed if the property value was incorrectly named.
Page layout routines access the marks for the current page. Two operations are provided for extracting the first and last marks of a given kind defined on a page. At the end of each page the list of marks is pruned of duplicates. This provides for normal running headers and footers as implemented by BasicPrint.Style, as well as for more exotic dictionary slug footers.