Re: Problem with preview and the blocking print dialog

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

John (J5) Palmieri wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 11:48 -0500, Yevgen Muntyan wrote:
>  
>
> > Alexander Larsson wrote:
> >
> >    
> >
> > > I think the best way to do this is to rely on an external helper. For a
> > > couple of reasons:
> > > * Running something as complicated as a document viewer in the same
> > > process as the application scares me for stability reasons. Its easy for
> > > a bug in the viewer to bring the whole app down, or to affect it badly.
> > > * Writing a good viewer is hard. Its not just about rendering the
> > > metafile to a window and adding next/prev buttons. The people working on
> > > evince have learnt this, and they have created a very nice viewer. This
> > > would just be a massive amount of duplicative work.
> > >
> > >
> > >      
> > But who needs a good viewer? Doesn't preview in gnomeprint
> > work well enough? Preview is needed to get the user the idea
> > of what he will have on paper (like will content fit on the page
> > or he needs to change margins, or something), but it doesn't
> > have to be of super good quality.
> >    
>
> Being that it is easier and more stable to implement a solution that
> will give you as close to exact representation of what will turn up on
> paper I really don't see your argument that we should implement an
> inferior viewer.
>  
The
"Running something as complicated as a document viewer in the same

process as the application scares me for stability reasons. Its easy for
a bug in the viewer to bring the whole app down, or to affect it badly.

Writing a good viewer is hard. Its not just about rendering the

metafile to a window and adding next/prev buttons." 
was not clear to me, and it is still not clear. Print preview should not be a 
document viewer, it should be bunch of small pictures of what's going to be on 
the paper. Using an external viewer means: window manager will treat it as a 
separate application (since it's a separate application), so it will behave just 
like what it will be - external viewer opening generated pdf document; and it 
will be incredibly slow and memory greedy. Also, it means that you can't
just install gtk to have fully-functional printing. You will also need to install
poppler, evince, and whatnot.
I personally would hate sitting and watching bouncing cursor for looking at 
whether i have one or two pages of printout. And no, I don't have a fast computer!
I have my less-than-2GHz machine with 256MB of memory and I still want to be able
to see print preview without extra trouble.

This stuff is not going to be a problem given that: the viewer application is light 
and fast; it must be very scriptable or something to make it look and behave as a 
natural part of the application. Evince doesn't satisfy these requirements

> BTW, MacOSX does previews in this manner also.
>  
MacOSX has lot of things, which won't be as pretty if implemented
on linux today.
It's not the *idea* of external viewer that's bad. It doesn't matter
if it's external or internal if it works well. But external viewer just
won't work well.

Regards,
Yevgen