Re: GPdf uses gnome-print

[Martin Kretzschmar <m_kretzschmar gmx net>]

Chema Celorio <chema ximian com> writes:

>> When I switched from gnome-print 2.0 to 2.2 I missed the font
>> aliases. Especially with Ghostscript/URW's fonts. A properly-installed
>> gnome-print 2.0 provided Times Roman, Helvetica, and the other Base-14
>> fonts, if the Nimbus fonts were found on the system. That's impossible
>> with the new gnome-print. Was this feature removed/not reimplemented
>> by intention?
>
> The feature is still there. The problem i think that since we are not
> providing the fonts ourselves we can't have them reliable. After the
> fontmap is loaded this aliases are generated. Might be buggy, but the
> code is there. gp_fontmap_add_aliases function inside gnome-fontmap.c

These aliases are not configurable. Maybe this is good. But the only
hardwired aliases are serif, sans, mono. Would you accept a patch for
Times, Helvetica, Courier, Symbol and Zapf Dingbats (the font families
available with any PostScript printer and PDF viewer)?

>> Another question: are there any plans to support embedding of fonts
>> not in fontconfig? As you know, pdf files often embed font files. For
>> printing/viewing these with gnome-print gpdf has to extract them from
>> the pdf and somehow download them to gnome-print.
>
> I don't see a reason not to. Should not be too hard to do, but it might
> require some thought on how to do it best.

Here are some thoughts:

Michael suggested something like:

gnome_print_add_font (GnomePrintContext *pc,
                      const guchar *fontdata, gsize length)

I played a bit with gnome-print internals. A hackish
outside-of-gnome-print implementation for quick results is here:

    http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gpdf/xpdf/gpdf-gnome-font.c

Of course, this doesn't work with print-masters, with bonobo printing, etc.

And I realized that this is the first gnome_print_foo function that
adds state to a print context which has to persist over page
boundaries. I don't know if that causes problems (at least the
gnome-print-job preview creates a new gnome-print-preview context for
each page it displays)

>> Ooh. Actually I just asked because I was afraid the print-preview
>> could disappear.
>
> It could in the long term if I can find a replacement for it. I thought
> you where asking the question the other way around so as to make GPdf be
> the preview engine of libgnomeprint. 

I guessed that.

> It seems like you need the preview to display Pdf files, why not
> move that code into GPdf?

Yes, that's what I use from gnome-print-ui. So when you want to get
rid of the canvas print-context some day, I'd take it.

> regards,
> Chema
>
>
> You don'

???

Thanks,
	Martin