Printing a graphic

[Henry Steigerwaldt]

To All:

Some time ago, I was able to design a program in TCL\TK to plot
weather observations on a map. The map was a .GIF file that the
program loaded and displayed on the computer screen. Once displayed,
the user would then select the parameter to plot, and the program
would then plot the values.

Displaying the map and the plotted values on a computer screen was
fine, but it was a different story getting everything on the map to
show up on a printed copy!

I wanted the option for the user to select a button to print
EVERYTHING on the map. However, I found out from a discussion group
that the only thing that would print would be the original map that
was first displayed. Any additional things that were displayed on the
map interactively were "layers," and would not appear on the printed
map. The only way to print everything (all layers) would be to first
make a screen capture, and then print that to the printer.

Well, I never was able to do this without having to do a lot of manual
things, such as starting a screen capture program, manually clicking
on the screen to capture it, and then clicking on a button within the
screen capture program to print it.

Now I want to write a similar program IN PYTHON to plot values on a
map, and be able to capture the screen and print EVERYTHING on the
screen AUTOMATICALLY
when a user selects a button. This is needed so one can refer to a
printed copy, rather than tying up computer screen to see it. Oh, one
other thing. I would like to be able to do this on a UNIX and LINUX
system, and maybe even on a WINDOWS system.

Do any of you have ideas on how to automate this process (i.e. one
button click, a screen capture, and then printing the screen to the
printer) in Python? Otherwise I might as well not write such a
program. It would really help to have it though at my work!

Sorry for the long winded discussion. Please keep things very basic,
as I am not really a programmer per se.

Henry Steigerwaldt
Hermitage, TN, USA