Re: Status of Gnome Print

["Trever L. Adams" <tadams-lists myrealbox com>]

On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 12:29, Chema Celorio wrote:
> They get their pango context from gnome-print, not pango. This pango
> context only has the fonts that we can print with.

How good are we (presumptuous use for gnome-print) at Unicode/i18n
issues such as Glyph replacement?  I don't entirely think we need Pango
for printing, except for such issues as that.  Maybe Pango engines need
to be of render (for X/GDI) type and of Glyph selection.  Then we could
use the Glyph engines in gnome-print.  Usually you have all your
placement figured out in the app (based on Pango and such), so it should
be fairly easy to convert to print if we had a similar kind of API,
maybe even exactly the same full featured API, which "thunks" to Pango
as appropriate.  I guess I am still figuring out enough of the Pango and
Gnome-Print api's and construction to know exactly how to say what I am
trying to say or how much it is already done.

If we have layout done already by Pango, we should be able to use it's
ideas of x,y, etc. to print.  We should also be able to have similar
Unicode/i18n support as mentioned above.  How integrated they become is
obviously a different issue.

After all, it seems that even if Gnome-Print suddenly starts supporting
Gimp-Print or Omni/foomatic drivers directly, instead of using
Ghostscript, we still need to be able to output either Postscript or
PDF, therefore, Pango rendering may be over kill.  I don't know...
having a hard time here.

Just throwing out ideas on how to make it better.  I should be playing
with Pango and Gimp-print this week in my DTP project... I have a lot of
ideas for the backend, but rendering and printing and the GUI are still
up in the air and need tons of code work and may dictate my back-end to
change.

Trever
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