[Gnome-print] [Fwd: Gnome printing issues]

[Chema Celorio <chema celorio com>]

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• From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>
• To: Raph Levien <raph acm org>
• Cc: Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>, gnome-hackers nuclecu unam mx
• Subject: Re: Gnome printing issues
• Date: 11 Sep 2000 21:07:30 -0400

> While I am definitely sympathetic to the freedom issues, I am reluctant
> to grow our own PDL when there's one of extremely high quality already
> available. Frankly, it smells like NIH to me. 

I agree.  

The gnome-print metafile reflects the API available to applications
right now.  I am convinced that we want to keep our main API into the
library be a C-based API to the imaging system and not just "PDF".

Whether our intermediate language is the metafile or something else is
not that much important.  The real problem is that our C API might not
be complete enough when compared to PDF.  What can we do to improve
our code?

For example, I would hate to loose the print-preview option in GNOME
applications that is done transparently for most applications, and can
be decorated at will by the programmer [1]

> I question whether we have the resources and commitment to build a
> PDL that comes close to the quality of PDF.

(1) Would you agree with me that we want the full C API to expose the full
feature set of our imaging model?  

> It's not trivial, guys! Lastly, we give up interoperability with the
> rest of the world. I realize that people may have differing senses
> of the importance of this interoperability - purists will say
> "freedom is much more important", while others will be out there
> developing interesting software like Samba, Wine, wv, gnapster, x86
> compiler back-ends for gcc, etc.

Having a PDF driver sounds trivial.  Indeed, we have one in
Gnome-Print right now.

Given (1), we could just use this as our PDL.  There is the issue of
versioning: the current version of the metafile has a versioning
mechanism to avoid crashes and to ignore tags it does not know (which
I believe is not the best approach, but this is as bad as using PS2
extensions on a PS1 printer).

I do not know much about PDF to make an informed comment here, so I
need your help: is PDF a programmable language like Postscript is?
Because this would complicate matters a lot.


[1] Whether that decorating the print preview is a practice we want to
encourage, a good practice or a bad practice is a different issue.

Miguel.

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