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

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

• 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.
• Fonts: PostScript and SVG fonts are more attractive than with the other output formats. Style variations such as bold and italic, as well as a wider range of sizes are available. A wide array of symbols are also available under PostScript as well, and can be accessed using special character codes .
• 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.