[Gnome-print] Re: Print Preview

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ximian com>]

Hello Jody!

On 03 May 2001 20:41:11 -0400, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> Are there any plans for a demand based preview architecture ?  I've
> recently noticed that printing large documents uses an enourmous
> amounts of memory.  In Gnumeric if you fill an entire column with a
> visible colour and select an option it will print 1700 pages.  This
> is obviously not _very_ useful, but it does highlight a limitation
> of the current rendering model.   The 1700 pages are very very
> simple.  It is not difficult to envision 100 pages each of which is
> 17x more complex.

You mean something like:

static int my_printin_function (GnomePrintContext *pc, gpointer data);

gnome_print_beginpage (pc, "Page 1");
gnome_print_callback (pc, my_printing_function, my_callback_data_1);
gnome_print_showpage (pc);
gnome_print_beginpage (pc, "Page 2");
...

> I'd assume this has come up before.  What are your thoughts ?

It DOES make sense.
This even allows application to do better background printing, than
simply pushing everything downstream.
Of course, nothing can be guaranteed, but for simple in-process/bonobo
drivers, like preview we probably can state, that it makes thing faster.
For more complex spooler everything will probably pushed into queue
at some point anyways.

Best whishes
Lauris Kaplinski