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Getting Hardcopies of Plots

There isn't really any need for this section because SM doesn't distinguish between hardcopy devices such as laser printers and other devices such as graphics terminals, except that it saves up plotting commands for hardcopy devices and sends them all when you are finished. There are, however, hard and easy ways to do anything and this section is intended to make your life a little simpler.

When a device that can produce hardcopy is closed the plot is sent off to the printer (using the command given as SY in the device's graphcap entry). The only way to close a device is to open another, any other, so it is just as good to say dev x11 as it is to say hardcopy dev x11 as the macro hardcopy does no more than open the null device. So one way to produce a plot is to say 

                device postscript
                plotting commands
                device x11

There are many different printers available, and even if you are using a postscript printer you might want portrait (postport) or landscape (postland) plots, so it is traditional to put the name of the desired printer into a variable printer. It is so traditional, indeed, that it can be done with a line such as 

printer     postport
in your `.sm' file.

The two commonest incantations are probably 

                device $printer
                playback
                device x11
or 
                device $printer
                my_macro
                device x11
which can be simplified to hcopy and hmacro my_macro respectively. The former can be given a single history number (e.g. hcopy 12) to only make a hardcopy of the one command, or a range of numbers (hcopy 1 12) to plot those lines (inclusive). The latter, if you omit the name of the macro, will prompt you to create a temporary macro that is then printed. If you want to make a hardcopy of the last line you have a choice, either hcopy -1 or hmacro, and then use the history editor to retrieve the desired line.

Some sites have many hardcopy devices of the same type, in which case they usually set up the SY command to expect an argument which is the name of the desired printer. You can deal with this by including it in your printer variable: define printer "postscript latypus" but this can be a nuisance, especially as unix already has a special (environment) variable PRINTER that specifies your default printer. The resolution is that both hcopy and hmacro are quite careful; if you have an SM variable PRINTER it is taken to be your default printer; if you don't have one they look for one in your `.sm' file, if they don't find one there they look for an environment (VMS: logical) variable. If all of these fail they take the first argument (hcopy) or last argument (hmacro) to be the name of the printer.

So if you have a PRINTER variable anywhere, hcopy and hmacro macro_name will work as before, if you don't then you'll have to say hcopy printer_name or hmacro macro_name printer_name.

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