Re: Status of Gnome Print

[Chema Celorio <chema ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 03:10, Trever L. Adams wrote:
> My questions are based on: http://www.levien.com/gnome/print-arch.html
> 
> Are multiple color spaces (RGB, CMY/CMYK) supported yet?  Can they be
> mixed or would say Adobe InDesign need to convert to one?

They are not supported nor there are in the short term plans. The reason
for that being is that the document you are referring to was the first
design of what gnome-print was going to be. In the recent requests and
feedback from app developers and users that I've heard, color spaces
have not been brought up. I haven't seen a gnome-print application that
would require/use them at this point. But it is something that will get
done when the need arises.

> Are ICC profiles allowed yet? (Argyll:
> http://web.access.net.au/argyll/argyllcms.html and SCARSE:
> http://www.scarse.org/) may be starting points.  (I know there may be
> some patents here, I believe this has more to do with certain methods of
> rendering intents, not with the concepts and 'dumb' conversions in and
> of themselves).

Same as the paragraph above.

> Unicode support for BMP and SMP (planes 0 and 1 I believe)?  Can these
> and all Unicode really be done in UTF-8 or is UTF-16 or UTF_32 needed?

I don't know what BMP & SMP are, but gnome-print is fully unicode aware
right now as the rest of GNOME is.

> Glyphlist support for such attributes as leading, kerning and tracking
> (or can these be faked)?

This is working, gnome-glyphlists.h is implemented.

> Any work to make it and Pango work together yet?

This is the most important improvement on the TODO list, I'll start
working on it after Gnome 2.2 (unless someone starts before I get to it,
hint, hint). I've given a lot of thought to it at this point but is not
something that was going to be ready to ship for 2.2.

> Alpha channels with postscript output? Yes, so postscript doesn't
> support it.  Does the library fake it yet?

Yes, the library fakes it by rendering regions that have alpha.

> Prepress related things that are listed or hinted at that I don't
> entirely understand... are they there yet?

I don't understand what you mean here. Could you expand a little bit?


The last update i sent about the general direction of gnome-print was a
paper I presented at OLS. You can find it here:
http://lists.gnome.org/mailman/admin/gnome-print-list

I will be sending an update about gnome-print to this list soon
(sometime this month) I'll be talking about what things got done since
that OLS paper, and lay out the plan for the upcoming 6-9 months.

regards,
Chema