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

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

   Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 02:21:54 +0200 (CEST)
   From: Lauris Kaplinski <lauris@ariman.ee>

   The main point in discussion really is:
   - whether PS is reasonable metafile format
   gnome-print advogates: no
   CUPS advogates: yes
		 ^
	and everyone else in the printing industry

   Having PS as metafile often results in need to transfer HUGE bitmap twice:
   - first - from app to printing system
   - second - from printing system to printing device
   Huge bitmaps are needed every time, PS does not have necessary functions,
   so everything should be rendered in client-side.
   AFAIK, even single alpha graphic on top of pageful of text results in need
   of sending full page as bitmap - because we cannot guarantee exact font
   (pixel-by-pixel) matching between client and server.

So instead you advocate using raw printer output -- which is intended
for firmware controlling a print mechanism to interpret -- as your
IL??????  What on earth possessed you guys to come up with THAT idea?

   On the other side - there will always be software rendering in gnome-print
   libs, for:
   - overcoming PS shortcomings
   - generating pixmap print-previews

Fine.  But doing a simple rendering for an RGB monitor (even if you
have to dither it down to 8 bits) is entirely different from
generating output to a raster printer.

   The only way to leave this rendering out, would be to create CUPS
   driver?, accepting gnome-print metafile, as input. But this driver would
   need renderer, closely matched with other gnome-print. So I am not sure,
   if it would make things easier at all.

Of course it would make things easier.  All of the device stuff would
be in one place.  You'd write one CUPS filter, that translates GMF to
Postscript, and not have to maintain a library of hundreds or
thousands of drivers.  But this seems a bit pointless, why not have
gnome-print generate Postscript directly off the Caanvas?

What you really should do is discuss any perceived shortcomings of
PostScript with Adobe.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton