Re: Gnome-print and Cairo

[Sven de Marothy <sven physto se>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 23:20, Owen Taylor wrote:
>On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 20:33 +0100, Sven de Marothy wrote:
>> Basically, we'd like to have Cairo integrated with gnome-print. If
I've
>> understood it correctly (and please, correct me if I'm wrong) the
>> long-term plan for gnome-print is in this direction too?

>Long term plan is libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui go away, and 
>the print dialog moves to GTK+.

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm not sure if I made my questions clear,
though.. Let me elaborate:

Does this mean only widgets will be provided by Gnome in the future,
leaving it to the application to stitch together job control (e.g. CUPS)
and rendering (e.g. Cairo)? That doesn't seem like an improvement over
the current gnome-print.

What we really would like for our project is something like this:

* Native gtk printing widgets, 
* Working with Cairo-PS or as its own Cairo backend for rendering
* Some high-level job and printer control routines built on CUPS,
integrating the whole package.

Basically, something similar to what gnome-print provides today, with
the rendering interface replaced by Cairo.

One choice is that I implement this within Classpath using Cairo+CUPS
and develop printing widgets of our own instead (like Sun's JDK has).
This will both mean more effort and a duplication of effort if Gnome
printing is going to go in this direction anyway. Also, we'd be missing
out on desktop integration.

The other option would be to help develop the Gnome printing API in this
direction. This would be best for us, and as I see it, best for Gnome
too. 

But I need to know if this is where the Gnome folks really are going, if
there's any work being done on this, and who would like to cooperate on
this?

Regards,
/Sven