Review from 1.4 (February/March 2003)

One of the most difficult things to get used to for me in moving to REALbasic from a C/C++ world was the difficulty involved in getting a good hard copy of source code printed out. REALbasic's print function tends to have some problems, and exporting the source to print in another application causes a loss of some important formatting information. Satori Publishing has made an effort to solve these problems for REALbasic programmers with their RB Source Code Printer.

The RB Source Code Printer does a fantastic job of generating hard copy printouts. It features more advanced formatting than is provided in the basic, plain text exporting from REALbasic. It also provides a table of contents of all modules, windows, and classes in your project, as well as an alphabetized index of every subroutine and function in your project. The more advanced text formatting combined with these organizational tools make printouts generated by RB Source Code Printer much more readable than the alternatives.

The interface is hardly elegant, but it is functional and gets the job done without any problems. The user imports a copy of source code exported from REALbasic, gives that source code a title, and tells the application to print their project. In its preferences, RB Source Code Printer allows its users to set page layout margins and font face and size. Overall, the user experience is perfectly adequate for standard usage.

There are several problems with RB Source Code Printer, some more serious than others. First, it would be nice if there were more flexible preferences. Syntax coloring and different font styles for different source elements would be welcome options. These are the sorts of things that would be relatively easy to add and would greatly increase the user experience. Another problem for RB Source Code Printer is not necessarily something that can be addressed with a quick fix. Because RB Source Code Printer uses the exported source code from an RB project, rather than the RB project file itself, it does not have access to any notes added to an element by the user. Because notes tend to be replacing long comments as the standard way to share information with programmers unfamiliar with your code, their absence in hard copy printouts represents a serious deficiency in RB Source Code Printer's performance. However, in regards to this deficiency, RB Source Code Printer is simply a victim of its circumstances. There is not necessarily a clear way to fix this problem until the way source code is shared by REALbasic changes.

Hard copy printouts are key for collaborative programming efforts or simply in archiving projects in a more "permanent" way. RB Source Code Printer generates print-outs that are better than any you can make through other avenues. As a result, it should be considered by anyone for whom print-outs are important. Keep in mind, though, that there are weaknesses to the package. So, though it is the best out there, there is certainly room for improvement.

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RB Source Code Printer