Printing (was Re: Some 2.6 thinking)
- From: Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>
- To: Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>
- Cc: Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>, James Henstridge <james daa com au>, gtk-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: Printing (was Re: Some 2.6 thinking)
- Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 14:41:48 -0400
On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 12:33, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 16:25, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 07:29:09PM +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> > > Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > >
> > > >But GTK+ doesn't have a cross-platform printing architecture, which I
> > > >think is almost essential. I suppose a cross-platform sound API is
> > > >needed as well. I think Qt has both.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > As far as printing goes, Cairo has a postscript backend (among others)
> > > which would fill the role of creating spool files. What it doesn't
> > > cover is a way to send those spool files to the printer.
> >
> > The FSG's papi api with existing wrapper to ipp/cups seems like a
> > good target for 'how to get the spool files to a printier'.
> > Unfortunately cairo's postscript backend is not exactly useful just
> > yet. It currently rasterizes then ships the result as postscript ...
> > Beyond making for really large files, it also precludes doing smart
> > filtering ala gimp-print.
>
> It also has the same problem as gnome-print doesn't it, i.e. it can't
> handle Unicode text properly and needs to integrate with Pango or
> something to do proper layout.
My personal plans for the next few months are to get Pango integrating
nicely with gnome-print, then turn around and use that experience to
work on Pango/Cairo integration.
I think targeting Cairo integration at GTK+-2.6 would be premature,
but there is definitely work that people interested in the area can
do:
- Real PS backend that you can use to print a 50 page document;
bitmaps may be a fallback, but we can't use them for the
normal case. I don't think anyone is working on this.
- Try out Cairo, make sure that the APIs are actually nice.
(Well, leaving aside type-naming weirdness.)
- Making Cairo run usably fast. (This is largely an X server
hacking task.)
Eventually, I believe that APIs to:
- display page setup / print dialogs
- get Cairo/Pango objects for the current printer
Do make sense as part of GTK+; these are things that:
- Make sense (in an abstract sense) cross-platform
- Are needed by a large fraction of applications.
Regards,
Owen
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