Re: Postscript, printing?

[Paolo Molaro <lupus lettere unipd it>]

On Fri, May 08, 1998 at 09:07:53AM +0000, Jamie Guinan wrote:
> Since GTK[GDK] is based on X, has anyone considered using the
> X Print extensions [XPRINT], perhaps underneath GDK/GTK?  XPRINT
> is free (pre R6.4), supports printers other than PostScript (PCL), 
> and my (meager) understanding is that you can render to a 
> "printer device context" using standard X calls, so GDK/GTK
> should fit nicely on top of it.

I did a patch some time ago to include the xprint extension in gdk
(see the archive of the gtk list for references), but we was in
freeze time so it was not included.
I plan to add it to the development branch in the next few days
when I get some free time.
It's nice to use the gdk_draw_* functions to print, but there are
some shortcomings with the XPrint extension way: you need to
connect to a *different* X server to do the printing and this is
not allowed with the current gtk/gdk implementation, so you need
a slave process to do the printing.
The second shortcoming is that I never found a system with the
xprt server configured:-)... this may change very sooni however...
So if we want the xprint extension to be useful we need to
support connections to different xservers in gdk and gtk: this was done
by me for a cvs snapshot of gtk in early february and I don't think
much of that patch applies anymore.
Note that the patch brokes binary compatibility and needs a few small
changes in programs and add-on libraries (gdkimlib) that access
gdk private data.

lupus