Distinct Imaging

You cannot directly preview documents using MiraPrint, however there are a few options for you.

Windows Users
By piping MiraPrint output through a program such as Ghostscript you can easily create PDF versions of your reports. You can then very simply make a call to Acrobat Reader and give your users a common interface to preview, print or simply archive documents.

Alternatively, you could use a PostScript preview application such as GSView to view the Postscript output on screen directly. This is extremely useful during report development to preview output without actually wasting paper.

Unix/Linux Users
Obviouly there is no way to actually preview a document through a character interface. If you use character based terminals, previewing may simply be impossible in your environment. If using an X-terminal system, Ghostscript is available for most environments along with GhostView.

Some customers using telnet clients on a Windows client use Ghostscript to create PDF files from MiraPrint output. They then share the output directory via Samba allowing their users to use Acrobat Reader to preview reports generated in UNIX/Linux.

Automating previewing

In MiraPrint 4.0 and on, the "selprtr.i" supports previewing MiraPrint output. A third party tool must be used, but can be configured in the "miraprnt.ini" file.

Adobe Acrobat Reader® is the generally preferred application to preview MiraPrint output, using GhostScript to first convert MiraPrint output to PDF format.

The default "miraprnt.ini" file included in versions 4.0 and on contain configuration options to allow GhostScript or Adobe Acrobat® to automatically support previewing. For the default options to work, GhostScript must be installed (may be locally or a UNC share) and "miraprnt.ini" must be configured to point to the installation directory. Additionally, Acrobat Reader must be installed as the default PDF file viewer application.

By reviewing the files "miraprnt.ini", "selprtr.i", "openstream.i" and "closestream.i", you will find examples on how you may want to integrate other previewing methods. This also should provide insite on methods you may want to use for previewing reports when not using the "selprtr.i" functionality.