Re: Problem with preview and the blocking print dialog

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 14:35 -0400, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 04:51:48PM -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 17:42 -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> > > I'm implementing the preview code in gtkprint.  I have decided to use an
> > > external helper (default is evince) to do print preview.  The idea was
> > > to write out to a pdf in /tmp and launch the external helper when the
> > > user hits the preview button.
> > 
> > <ignorant>
> > 
> > Why do we have an external helper?
> > 
> > Gnome-print would save everything to its own internal metafile, and then
> > it would spit it to a gnome-canvas.  Could we make Cairo just render
> > everything to a preview window?
> > 
> > </ignorant>
> 
> This was a performance nightmare in libgnomeprint because it would
> queue up the entire document in a metafile which could easily reach
> into the hundreds of megs.  The new code is a huge improvement in
> supporting per page rendering.  If that can avoid the overhead then
> there are benefits to inline rendereing.  Some of the new features
> Lutz added to gnomeprintui such as drag-n-drop page reordering and
> subsetting are not really feasible with an external 

I guess not having to render the whole document is a distinct advantage
of the in-process preview. 

What does subsetting mean? Just changing the page ranges from the
preview window? That sounds useful.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a lonely skateboarding paranormal investigator in a wheelchair. She's a 
violent thirtysomething politician from out of town. They fight crime!