Gnome-print and Cairo

[Sven de Marothy <sven physto se>]

Hi,
I'm hacking a bit on GNU Classpath, the free Java runtime effort, and
progress has been very good recently. (about 200k lines of code so far
this year!)

However, one of the missing pieces left for us is printing. Now, our AWT
implementation is currently built on Gnome and Pango, so this is where
gnome-print comes in. 

The Java API allows for native printing dialogs to be used, so obviously
this is something we'd like. However, Java uses the Java2D imaging model
both for on-screen drawing and printing. 

The java2d model is relatively advanced, with support for compositing
and so on, and our current implementation of that part for on-screen
drawing uses Cairo.

I wrote a bit fuller description of the current situation on our
mailing-list:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2004-11/msg00077.html

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?

And if so, is there any work being done on this yet? We have some
interest in helping out.

So.. I'd like to hear what you guys have to say. 
Any thoughts or ideas would be nice.

/Sven (please CC: -I'm not subscribed)