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

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ariman ee>]

On Sun, 21 May 2000, Robert L Krawitz wrote:

>    Well - at moment, to do advanced C based OO programming, most people use
>    Gtk+, thus creating implicit dependency in X libraries installed. But this
>    does not mean, that X has to be RUNNING.
> 
> MOST people?  Where I happen to work (a major system vendor), I
> haven't heard Gtk+ mentioned even once.

Lets not start language flaming here :) But I insist, that using OO
techniques is often good, and using any other (I do not any such, but
certainly there are) C toolkit involves lot more installing pain to user.
Fortunately commercial unixes are slowly starting to mimic Linux, so
sooner or later you can find Gtk+ included with your favourite unix
too. (Miguel and others are working like madmen, to make it happen sooner
:)

>    The one goal of Gnome is to provide good set of support libraries for
>    programming. At moment sending PS commands to filedescriptor does not
>    help people creating neither cute print previews (no alpha) nor export to
>    bitmaps (same reason). Rendering job in client-side is reasonable for
>    bitmap applications (GIMP), but huge overkill for all vector/text based
>    apps. And until some free PS renderer is created, using libart or similar
>    techinque, the best possible solution for these is certainly hybrid
>    system, like gnome-print is now. It lets you use any spooling and
>    rasterizing engine, while preserving client-side consisteness and
>    extensibility, which is lost with plain PostScript.
> 
> Wait a minute -- there IS a free Postscript renderer around.  It's
> called Ghostscript.  What am I missing here?

Unfortunately its quality is too poor for on-screen display or bitmap
rendering. Porting GS to libart is one possibility, of course. Plus
someone has to create alpha extensions to it.

Regards,
Lauris