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

[Michael Sweet <mike easysw com>]

Ben Woodard wrote:
> ...
> 1) GS drivers doen't support all the features that printers are
> capable of and from my initial assement quite a few of them are
> going to be non-trivial to implement. I only spent a couple days in
> the GS code. I might have missed something but it is rather
> difficult code to grok. Mentally shifting between the C code with
> huge number of macro expansions and the PS code that defines much of
> the operating environment that the PS runs with was quite a
> challenge.

Many of the GS drivers are spaghetti code, a fact even Aladdin
admits to.  However, as long as you are adding stuff to the
put params, get params, and print page functions you can avoid
mucking with the macro-based dithering that is so popular in the
GS drivers (and unfortunately in the current GIMP-print drivers...)

> 2) I'm assuming that whether I believe that PS should be the meta
> file format or not I am going to get BLOBs (Big Lumps of Binary
> data -- I like the acronym ;-) ) dumped into the spooler. The idea
> was to deal with the fact that I will get BLOBs not to try to force
> the world to do it the way that I think it should be done.

Well, like it or not PostScript is the defacto standard printing
language for 90% of all UNIX apps.  This doesn't mean that it is
the best solution, just the easiest.

Any general printing solution for UNIX/Linux must support PostScript
to be accepted.  If GNOME can add a new, portable metafile format
that is resource-friendly and will allow for things like accounting,
color management, etc., then it will likely become a viable
alternative to PostScript for application printing.

> ...
> I will look how you did it. I'm quite ready to believe that I missed
> something obvious in GS or that I approached it at completely the
> wrong level to see how to do it.

I can imagine that if you only experience with GS is looking at the
drivers you might be "scared away".  The code can be quite
overwhelming at first, and even I get overwhelmed after mucking
with it since the 2.0 days.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  mike@easysw.com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com