oracular (3) mcprint.3ncurses.gz

NAME

       mcprint - write binary data to printer using terminfo capabilities

SYNOPSIS

       #include <curses.h>

       int mcprint(char *data, int len);

DESCRIPTION

       This  function  uses  the  mc5p or mc4 and mc5 capabilities, if they are present, to ship given data to a
       printer attached to the terminal.

       Note that the mcprint code has no way to do flow control with the printer or to know how  much  buffering
       it  has.   Your  application  is  responsible  for  keeping  the  rate of writes to the printer below its
       continuous throughput rate (typically about half of its nominal cps  rating).   Dot-matrix  printers  and
       6-page-per-minute lasers can typically handle 80cps, so a good conservative rule of thumb is to sleep for
       a second after shipping each 80-character line.

RETURN VALUE

       The mcprint function returns ERR if the write operation aborted for some reason.   In  this  case,  errno
       will contain either an error associated with write(2) or one of the following:

       ENODEV
            Capabilities for printer redirection do not exist.

       ENOMEM
            Couldn't allocate sufficient memory to buffer the printer write.

       When mcprint succeeds, it returns the number of characters actually sent to the printer.

EXTENSIONS

       mcprint was designed for ncurses(3NCURSES), and was not found in SVr4 curses, 4.4BSD curses, or any other
       previous curses implementation.

PORTABILITY

       Applications employing this ncurses  extension  should  condition  its  use  on  the  visibility  of  the
       NCURSES_VERSION preprocessor macro.

BUGS

       Padding in the mc5p, mc4, and mc5 capabilities is not interpreted.

SEE ALSO

       ncurses(3NCURSES)