VARKON Version 1.16 1998-11-12

### Printing and plotting with variable linewidth and color

VARKON supports color printouts through the PEN attribute. Pen 1 is usually black, pen 2 red, pen 3 green, pen 4 blue and so on. The PEN attribute can be used in conjunction with the WIDTH attribute to produce a colored printout with user defined linewidths. The "-bw" parameter can be used to force a color printer to neglect pen numbers and only print in black. This is useful if a color printerdriver like "postscript" or "msw32.dll" is used for a non color printer which may otherwise try to emulate color by the use of grayscales.

VARKON supports variable linewidth in two different ways. The normal way that should be used in new applications is to use the WIDTH attribute to control linewidth. VARKON's plotterdrivers support the WIDTH attribute directly if the printer supports variable linewidth or emulate variable linewidth by painting if the printer does not support it. The "postscript" driver for example supports variable linewidth directly since variable linewidth is supported by the postscript specification. Other drivers like the "epson" driver for example automatically create wide lines by painting as many parallell thin lines as required to achieve the selected width. The -ws plotterdriver option may be used to override the -s option for scaling of linewidth during plotting.

The other way linewidth is supported is through the use of penfiles. This is an older method that is kept alive to support older applications and it is still supported by all printer drivers. We do not reccommend this method for new applications as it might be removed from VARKON in a future release. All printer drivers support the "-pf" parameter which enables you to specify the name of a penfile. A penfile maps the PEN attribute to specific linewidths. Pen 1 could be 0.5 millimeters, pen 2 could be 1.0 millimeters and so on. You can not use this method in conjunction with color or the WIDTH attribute. Do not use the "-pf" parameter if you want to use PEN for color or WIDTH for linewidth.

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