chr(12) Form Feed in Notepad (Windows)

[Tim Chase]

W. eWatson wrote:
> I am writing a txt file. It's up to the user to print it using
> Notepad or some other tool.  I have no idea how to send it
> directly to the printer, but I really don't want to furnish
> that capability in the program. From Google, The Graphics
> Device Interface (GDI).

If you're writing it to a text file and assuming that Notepad is 
smart enough to properly handle form-feeds, I'm sorry, you'll be 
disappointed...this says more about the brain-deadness of Notepad 
than your optimism :-)

If you have a configurable destination, you might be able to do 
something within your Python app like

   if 'win' in sys.platform.lower():
     default_dest = "lpt1:"
   else:
     default_dest = "/dev/lp0"
   dest = config.get("printer", default_dest)
   f = file(dest, 'wb')
   f.write(my_output_with_ff)
   # optionally
   # f.write(chr(12))
   # to eject the last page
   f.close()

Otherwise, you'd have to write to something a default Windows 
application would know how to handle with embedded 
form-feeds/page-breaks (i.e., not Notepad as the default .txt 
handler).  My first thought would be to export it as RTF (there 
was a good python RTF library I tinkered with one afternoon -- 
it's a quick google away) which should allow embedding 
page-breaks, and even give you a fair bit of additional control 
over other aspects like fonts and styles.

-tkc