[gnome-print] What is cooking

[Chema Celorio <chema ximian com>]

Just a heads up on what has been cooking in gnome-print recently...

- OLS talk

  I gave a talk on OLS about gnome-print. I should put the slides here
soon, I promise. Had a couple of good discussions with some hackers
while at OLS.

This document explains my 9-12 month plan for gnome-print:
http://primates.ximian.com/~chema/gnome-print-ols.txt

- I half-ported the PDF driver to 2.0

  The basic stuff is in the cvs now. It is in a state where a brave soul
can work with it to finish it, a good starting point for a new
contributor (hint, hint). The basic stuff is working, embedding Type 1
fonts is working but only the first 256 characters of the font work fine
;-), we need to split up fonts in 256 blocks and change the font
depending on which block the glyph is in.

PDF with embedded True Type fonts are not opening fine in ghostscript,
have not been able to track down if this is a gnome-print or gs bug.
Might require help from the gs hackers.

- The code examples are starting to shape up

  I've been spending time writing the code samples for gnome-print. This
has helped development a lot. Check out the examples in libgnomeprintui.

- Have been working on adding pango support for gnome-print

  I've been playing around with the code to add pango support to
gnome-print. Most of my progress has been in figuring how we want to do
this. I have a mental image of how we could do this in a way which
doesn't require a gnome-print rewrite, which i want to avoid by all
costs. gnumeric is going to need pango support in gnome-print very soon.
I'll spend most of my time working on this till I nail it.

- Regression testing suite taking off

  It looks like a great long term investment. I still have some
unimplemetnted ideas like doing print jobs for each of the fonts
installed in a system so that we test font embedding real well.

- Carlos/Clahey/Orph/Damon have been talking about integrating printman 
with gnome-print as there is a lot of code that we should share. GO FOR
IT GUYS! Show me the money.

- Cups, cups, CUPS

Cups integration.

Someone needs to tackle this soon. I will if nobody does. The problem is
that whoever does it needs to _really_ _really_ understand gnome-print,
gnome-print-config and libgpa. It is not a matter of adding it to the
dialog, we need to fetch options eventually. If nobody gets to this,
I'll will soon (2-3 months?). 

This is by far the most user requested feature. 

regards,
Chema