Re: High level layout API for gnome print

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

On Fri, 2003-10-24 at 14:46, Will Newton wrote:
> On Friday 24 Oct 2003 14:18, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> 
> > > We need to do some reports of various things - database metrics,
> > > etc. For this it would be good to be able to do tables, centering
> > > and justification. We've looked at various layout languages like
> > > LaTeX, XSL-FO and Docbook, but none of them seem to really be
> > > flexible enough.
> >
> > XML is supremely flexible -- look more closely.
> 
> I didn't mention XML, but XSL-FO. Our page layouts are designed in XML, and 
> trust me, I know XML. The difficulty is rendering these layouts. Using XSLT 
> it is possible to produce all sorts of outputs such as those listed above. 
> However, in terms of actual page layout capability, we found these solutions 
> were not adequate (nested tables, absolute positioning, intelligent page 
> breaking, esoteric page sizes etc.). This need led us to look at gnome print.
> 
> > > We also have a requirement to be able to print some of our on screen
> > > forms, which are built from glade and rendered by GTK. Would this be
> > > possible to do easily?
> >
> > There are various ways of rendering XML in gtk and related libraries.
> > From a base of XML (e.g. via docbook) you can generate HTML for
> > on-screen use, PDF or Postscript for printing, plain text, etc.
> 
> I was referring to being able to output to gnome print exactly (or close 
> enough) what is shown on screen similar to Xprint. A "print screen" 
> functionality.


To throw a couple of ideas into the discussion:

(i) xmlroff is attempting to allow you to hook XSL-FO directly into
Gnome Print; see http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/

AFAIK it has an intermediate stage in which it generates a tree of areas
that have been reached their final position on the pages; they are
GObject subclasses.  There's been some talk of exposing these, so
perhaps there could be an API at this level (and, I hope an XML
serialisation format).  This might be a good interchange format that you
could generate your data in and send to GnomePrint.

(ii)  Perhaps a gnome print backend could expose a GdkDrawable, and
allow you to render GDK primitives onto it directly?

-- 
David Malcolm
http://www.davemalcolm.demon.co.uk