GNOME Ghostview and plug ins

["Daniel M. German" <dmg csg uwaterloo ca>]

Hi Everybody,

Lately I have been thinking in the long term development of GNOME
Ghostview.

The leading feature of ggv for a GNOME user will be the ability to
take advantage of BONOBO. Except for this, there are few incentives
for a user to switch from GhostView to ggv.


I have been thinking what the "next generation" GhostView viewer
should be like. One feature that seems missing from GV is the ability
to apply filters to the document. For instance, I want my document
printed "2up" or with the words "draft" in gray in the background, or
save part of the page as a TIFF or JPG, or I want to add page numbers
to the pages...

A user that needs to do any of the above mentioned tasks should apply
some small utilities to the document (after finding those utilities :)

I envision a plug-in feature in ggv that will allow people to write
filters for PostScript documents that will generate PostScript or
other formats. 


This makes sense. Most of the filter utilities have to scan the
document, break it into pages and then apply the filter. ggv does the
first two tasks.


What do people think? Does it make sense? Furthermore, is there any
document that describes the "plug in architecture" in general? I know
that the GIMP, gedit, gnumeric and other apps support plug ins. Are
they documented, both at the design level and at the plug-in writer
level?

Any help will be appreciated.




--
Daniel M. German                  "No one can be a great thinker
                                   who does not recognize,
                                   that as a thinker it is his
                                   first duty to follow
                                   his intellect to whatever
   John Stuart Mill ->             conclusions it may lead."
http://csgwww.uwaterloo.ca/~dmg/home.html
dmg@csg.uwaterloo.ca