Re: Gnome Office, Bonobo and other apps

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

> > Providing a SVG view will be easy for gnome apps, since gnome-print has
> > a svg backend (only cvs version).
>
> Dom has done great work getting the svg backend for gnome-print. Although
> what he has now is more a proof of concept. Dom ran across some absolutely
> fundamental limitations of gnome-print doing this. The SVG printing only
> works for Latin-1 charsets at this point.

Yeah, gnome-print's CVS version has a SVG backend. It's not enabled yet, but 
I hope that it will soon be (in the gnome 2.7 series).

It mostly works. By "mostly", I mean as follows:

1) It emits SVG1.2/SVGPrint compliant SVG. This means that it supports 
multi-page docs via the <pageSet>, <page> tags. Unfortunately, no viewers 
support such a construct yet. LibRSVG gets it right for page 1. Of course, 
since I own librsvg, I can move on making it support multi-page SVGs.

2) Text. Basically, the backends get passed a list of Glyphs. While this is 
admirable - it saves the backends from having to write redundant, 
potentially buggy UNICHAR->Glyph translation code - it puts a damper on what 
types of backends we can have. Concretely, it would be useful if we could 
get the UNICHAR text as well.

Mapping from a Glyph->UNICHAR is an expensive operation and isn't guaranteed 
to work (think ligatures, Pango Shapers where multiple characters combine to 
form 1 glyph).

What I have *should* work for latin1, provided that you don't use ligatures 
(ff, fl, fi, ...). It should work for a lot of things besides latin1 too. It 
just won't work for everything.

> We also need to print the svg's. I guess this is some sort of svg ->
> translation.

We're looking at abstracting the backend away from LibRSVG so that it just 
isn't libart-based. For now, content yourselves with printing the RGBA 
buffer.

Dom

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