Re: [Gnome-print] Re: [Gimp-print-devel] An introduction to gnome-print (fwd)

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

> I guess we have different goals.  I'd like to see a common, easy
> to use printing solution that provides what is needed by 99% of
> the applications and users.

So do we.  

But we also care about empowering developers.

> PostScript and a standard printing interface/printer driver doesn't
> prevent you from doing this; in fact, you can generate a printer-
> resolution image (with CUPS it is a raster stream, complete with
> printer options and a page dictionary) and send it to the printing
> system for the drivers to manage if you like.

Hence, reinventing a little piece of Postscript every time.  

"Need an alpha blue box on top of the drawing I did before", "Guess I
will roll my own postscript interpreter".

"Need stroke direction here", "OOPSIE!  Guess I will roll my own again"

> > What about 3D (holograms)? Stroke direction (for stone graving) etc.
> 
> I'd guess that these are not printing operations that most users
> will use, and they will require extremely specialized applications
> that will likely not use GNOME-print to interface with their
> respective output devices.

They only require very specialized applications because the underlying
printing system does not move up with the times as Lauris pointed out.

We just need to ship a new Evil DSO and people will be able to print
those things from the simplest application.

Remember: we are here for the user, but we also empower the develper.
Man I am starting to like that :-)

> I don't think you understand - applications can ALWAYS provide
> their own rendering/imaging stuff.  The main problem we have with
> embedding printer drivers in GNOME-print is that THOSE DRIVERS ARE
> NOT AVAILABLE TO ALL APPLICATIONS AND THAT WILL PREVENT THOSE "NEW
> TECHNOLOGIES" FROM BEING USED AT ALL!

Not really.  There is nothing stopping you, or anyone else to
contribute code to make the code easy to use for every app in the
system.

A 3-hour hack would be to expose an API for GnomePrint that just uses
the Metafile driver, and then have an external process load the
metafile and print.  This is the worst possible implementation, but it
takes less than 3 hours to do.

Miguel.