Tcl 9.0/Tk9.0 Documentation > Tk Commands, version 9.0.0 > print

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NAME

print — Print canvas and text widgets using native dialogs and APIs.

SYNOPSIS

tk print window

DESCRIPTION

The tk print command posts a dialog that allows users to print output from the canvas and text widgets. The printing will be done using platform-native APIs and dialogs where available.

The canvas widget has long supported PostScript export and both PostScript and text files can be sent directly to a printer on Unix-like systems using the “lp” and “lpr” Unix commands, and the tk print command does not supersede that functionality; it builds on it. The tk print command is a fuller implementation that uses native dialogs on macOS and Windows, and a Tk-based dialog that provides parallel functionality on X11.

PLATFORM NOTES

macOS

The Mac implementation uses native print dialogs and relies on the underlying Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) to render text output from the text widget and PDF conversion of the canvas data to the printer or to a PDF file.

Windows

The Windows implementation is based on the GDI (Graphics Device Interface) API. Because there are slight differences in how GDI and Tk's canvas widget display graphics, printed output from the canvas on Windows may not be identical to screen rendering.

X11

The X11 implementation uses a Tk GUI to configure print jobs for sending to a printer via the “lpr” or “lp” commands. While these commands have a large number of parameters for configuring print jobs, printers vary widely in how they support these parameters. As a result, only printer selection and number of copies are configured as arguments to the print command; many aspects of print rendering, such as grayscale or color for the canvas, are instead configured when PostScript is generated.

SEE ALSO

canvas, text, tk

KEYWORDS

print, output, graphics, text, canvas