***************************************************************************
Copyright 2018-2023,2024 Thomas E. Dickey *
Copyright 1998-2010,2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. *
*
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a *
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the *
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including *
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, *
distribute, distribute with modifications, sublicense, and/or sell *
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is *
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: *
*
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included *
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. *
*
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS *
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF *
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. *
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, *
DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR *
OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR *
THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. *
*
Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright *
holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the *
sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written *
authorization. *
***************************************************************************

$Id: curs_print.3x,v 1.38 2024/03/16 15:35:01 tom Exp $
\%mcprint - write binary data to printer using terminfo capabilities

#include <curses.h>

int mcprint(char *data, int len);

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. .

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:

5 ENODEV Capabilities for printer redirection do not exist.

5 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.

\%mcprint was designed for \%ncurses(3X), and was not found in SVr4 curses , 4.4BSD curses , or any other previous curses implementation. Applications employing this \%ncurses extension should condition its use on the visibility of the \%NCURSES_VERSION preprocessor macro. Padding in the mc5p, mc4, and mc5 capabilities is not interpreted. \%curses(3X)