Re: [Gnome-print] Re: [Gimp-print-devel] An introduction to gnome-print(fwd)

[Michael Sweet <mike easysw com>]

Lauris Kaplinski wrote:
> ...
> This is exactly what gnome-print does. And it can output PS as well,
> so where is the problem?

Doing all sorts of printer drivers inside an application that output
raw data to the printing system, preventing even the simplest
accounting, etc. required by users.  (want to see what page is
currently printing? Oh, sorry, you sent me a raw file to print...)

> ...
> This exactly is the issue. If toolkit does this anyway, it has to
> include full-featured rasterizer. And I can see no reason, that
> rasterizer cannot output some neat PCL/ESC/P2 too...

Well, have fun trying to get your drivers to work with all printers.
You'll quickly bloat GNOME-print so much that noone will use it.

> On the other hand: Take 20 overlayed semi-transparent A5 rectangles
> on A4 page. Unless printer driver can intercept into PS job very
> intelligently, printing such beast via PS take 10x more memory, than
> printing single A4 pre-rasterized page.

Send a full-resolution A4 page to a PS printer and you will wait
a long time regardless.  For a typical 600dpi color laser printer
you're looking at 144MB of PostScript data for your example.

> And the reason few people use semitransparent shapes/text/images in
> printing is not that they do not need these, but this simply had not
> been possible until recent times.

Alpha transparency has been around for nearly 20 years.  SGI shipping
Showcase (which supports alpha transparency) in 1988 (12 years ago)
which by the way does transparency with PS output...

> ...
> Some desktop users also care, if printing on their machine requires
> 4 different programs of just right version numbers, depending on
> unknown number of rarely found libraries, or just 2 programs,
> depending on few huge, but well known libs.

Every Linux distribution I've seen includes Ghostscript or some
other printing solution.  Not the greatest thing in the world, but
a better place for drivers than in GNOME-print.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  mike@easysw.com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com