SVG, Gnome Office and gnome-print.

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

Hi Everyone,
            I guess I should CC the gnome-print ml for this but I'm not
subscribed. I hope the the people on both lists can forward
this question to the gnome-print list.

My evil plans for Gnome-Office's eventual World Domination require
extensive use of Vector graphics. The most obvious candiate for these is
SVG but there also substantial drawbacks.

Firstly, I would like our applications to be able to make Vector Graphic
representations of ourselves so they can be embedded easily in each other.
This means that every Gnome-Office application should be able to do this.
The most obvious way to implement this for Gnome-print to produce an SVG
output (along with it's libart/rgba, ps and pdf backends.)

If gnome-print can be forced to produce SVG output then all gnome-apps can
instantly make SVG representations of themselves allowing their contents
to be easily embedded in any app that supports SVG images.

Since we now have librsvg which nicely rasterizes SVG, showing SVG
onscreen is quite easy.

But we also need to be able to *print* SVG graphics. The most obvious
thing to do here would be to enable gnome-print to print SVG images by
translating their definitions into appropriate ps and PDF representations.

Anyway I was hoping that a gnome-print maintainer could let me know what
is happening with these features. Are they interesting to the gnome-print
people? Is there a plan to implement them? Is there a time-scale to
implement them? Are we waiting on some other project to solidify before
implementing them?

Is gnome-print going to be abandoned in favour of a more general X11 based
printing project? If so what is the timeline for this?

Printing is 100% essential for all GO apps so it would nice to get an idea
of what is happenning.

Cheers

Martin

PS. I did not mean this email to sound confrontational but I have been
uneasy about this essential piece of infrastructure and the SVG thing is
just essential for GO IMHO.