Re: [Gnome-print] Re: [Gimp-print-devel] An introduction to gnome-print (fwd)

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

   Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 03:17:47 +0200 (CEST)
   From: Lauris Kaplinski <lauris@ariman.ee>

   Mos of which are programs. gnome-libs package from Red Hat 6.1 is less
   than megabyte. To /usr/lib it installs less than 1.8MB of files.
   Aside standard stuff (X etc.) it requires esd, gnome-audio, xpm, jpeg and
   png libraries. Not very much.

It requires SOUND support?

   Well - at moment, to do advanced C based OO programming, most people use
   Gtk+, thus creating implicit dependency in X libraries installed. But this
   does not mean, that X has to be RUNNING.

MOST people?  Where I happen to work (a major system vendor), I
haven't heard Gtk+ mentioned even once.

   The one goal of Gnome is to provide good set of support libraries for
   programming. At moment sending PS commands to filedescriptor does not
   help people creating neither cute print previews (no alpha) nor export to
   bitmaps (same reason). Rendering job in client-side is reasonable for
   bitmap applications (GIMP), but huge overkill for all vector/text based
   apps. And until some free PS renderer is created, using libart or similar
   techinque, the best possible solution for these is certainly hybrid
   system, like gnome-print is now. It lets you use any spooling and
   rasterizing engine, while preserving client-side consisteness and
   extensibility, which is lost with plain PostScript.

Wait a minute -- there IS a free Postscript renderer around.  It's
called Ghostscript.  What am I missing here?