gnome-print and GnomeCanvas

[Ben Collins-Sussman <bsussman inso com>]

A friend and I have started writing an interactive music typesetting
program.  It's written entirely in scheme, using the gnome-guile
bindings.  (Yes, we love scheme.  No, our app is nothing like
LilyPond.):)

Up till now, we've been creating musical "notes" by drawing lines and
arcs either into a GTK widget or a postscript file.  We've recently
discovered the Magical GnomeCanvas and are now salivating over it.  We
love the idea of creating our own GnomeCanvasObjects for musical
symbols!

However, we've also discovered that no matter how much time we put
into our arcs and lines, our musical symbols still look crappy
compared to a dedicated music font.  We're hoping that by throwing our
application on the GNOME bandwagon, a number of issues can be
automagically fixed for us:

*  The ability to install a real music font
*  The ability to use this font on a GnomeCanvas Widget
*  The ability to make the GnomeCanvas widget dump postscript

I've been reading as much developer docs as possible on the GNOME
developer site, but I seem to have only become more confused as to
what APIs are really available at this time.  

For example, does the GnomeFont abstraction exist yet?  If not, does
the gnome-print module work with GnomeCanvas?  That is, if I start
displaying an X-windows music font on my GnomeCanvas, can the canvas
automatically output postscript?  Or do I need to manually "repaint"
the display into a printing-context?  And will the gnome-print module
be able to make use of the X music font?

I *did* read this list's thread on the painful lack of WYSIWYG fonts
in X.  Perhaps our application could do whatever Gnumeric is doing;
perhaps someone could explain that.

Any advice would be *greatly* appreciated.


-Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@red-bean.com>
 http://www.red-bean.com