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Replacing the Print Dialog

The Print dialog is the last component in our application that uses Motif. The current Print() function does nothing more than write the plain text to a temporary file, and then executes 'lpr' to send the text to the printer. Since we will use QPrinter, we do not this function any more, so we remove it. The current MainWindow::filePrint() implementation is removed as well. We will write a new MainWindow::filePrint() implementation in mainwindow.ui.h.

Note: The steps involved in using the QPrinter class are beyond the scope of this walkthrough and will not be discussed here. The QPrinter Class Reference, QSimpleRichText Class Reference and the Simple Application Walkthrough contain information on the use of QPrinter.

For completeness, the code to initialize a QPrinter object is included below.

Using Rich Text for Printing

Qt provides rich text using a subset of HTML. The QSimpleRichText class makes rich-text printing simple. All we need to do is create a string with the proper format tags inserted at the appropriate places. For our example, we will keep the printing output similar to previous versions.

First, we create the format tags that we will use.

Next we just loop over all pages, appending the page label, contents and formatting characters to a printtext variable (which is a QString).

The rest of the MainWindow::filePrint() function is the actual printing code. Here we simply create a QSimpleRichText object using the string we created above, and draw this string on the QPrinter object using QPainter.

Removing the Dependency on Xt/Motif

Our application no longer uses any Xt or Motif widgets. We can now finish removing the dependencies on Xt and Motif.

First, we cleanup the #include statements in mainwindow.ui.h.

The MainWindow::fileNew() function uses the Boolean and False keywords from the Xt library. C++ has these built into the language, so we use bool and false instead.

The last modification needed to completely remove Xt and Motif from our application is to stop using the QMotif class. We remove the qmotif.h #include statement from todo.cpp, and remove the instantiation from the main() function.

After doing this, we can remove the -lXm and -lqmotif from the LIBS variable in our project file. Our project file also contains source and headers for the the old custom Motif widgets previously used in our application. We remove these as well.

After regenerating the Makefile and building our project, we confirm that the application works correctly.

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