Re: High level layout API for gnome print

[Will Newton <wnewton cmedltd com>]

On Friday 24 Oct 2003 14:18, Allin Cottrell wrote:

> > We need to do some reports of various things - database metrics,
> > etc. For this it would be good to be able to do tables, centering
> > and justification. We've looked at various layout languages like
> > LaTeX, XSL-FO and Docbook, but none of them seem to really be
> > flexible enough.
>
> XML is supremely flexible -- look more closely.

I didn't mention XML, but XSL-FO. Our page layouts are designed in XML, and 
trust me, I know XML. The difficulty is rendering these layouts. Using XSLT 
it is possible to produce all sorts of outputs such as those listed above. 
However, in terms of actual page layout capability, we found these solutions 
were not adequate (nested tables, absolute positioning, intelligent page 
breaking, esoteric page sizes etc.). This need led us to look at gnome print.

> > We also have a requirement to be able to print some of our on screen
> > forms, which are built from glade and rendered by GTK. Would this be
> > possible to do easily?
>
> There are various ways of rendering XML in gtk and related libraries.
> From a base of XML (e.g. via docbook) you can generate HTML for
> on-screen use, PDF or Postscript for printing, plain text, etc.

I was referring to being able to output to gnome print exactly (or close 
enough) what is shown on screen similar to Xprint. A "print screen" 
functionality.