graphic figures and gtk and gtkprint

[Dan McMahill <mcmahill mtl mit edu>]

Hello,

I have a gtk app I wrote about 12 years ago.  I've slowly evolved it.  I 
have about a dozen figures (graphics) that get displayed in some of the 
dialogs.  Two examples of these figures can be seen at 
http://wcalc.sf.net/tech.html

The figures are drawn with tgif (a nice 2-d vector drawing program) and 
then I export several formats from that:

- png for display on the web page I listed as well as for a CGI version 
of wcalc.

- xpm for displaying in some of my gtk dialogs (see a screen shot at 
http://www.sf.net/gtk-wcalc.html

- eps for printing.

Currently my printing is done via a custom dialog box and it works by 
sending postscript code (generated by my code but it includes the eps 
versions of my graphics) to a file or to a program like lpr.  This is a 
hold over from the fact that wcalc was written originally for gtk-1.x

Now that gtkprint is available I want to convert over so I can have 
better cross-platform printing support.

I'm totally new to cairo and pango but have managed to get the basics 
working.  The problem is the figures.  I've tried loading my png files 
and rendering them with cairo.  The problem is that the bitmap version 
just doesn't look that hot (especially the text) when printed. 
Especially when compared to the postscript version.

Does anyone have suggestions for the right way to deal with these 
graphics?  I still need png for the web pages, probably xpm for my gtk 
dialogs and some vector format for printing.  I understand there is a 
way with SVG to get the printing but I can't seem to get my figures into 
SVG short of re-drawing them in some other tool (inkscape maybe?). 
Programming the figures in cairo would make them  pretty and I guess 
those could go directly in the gtk forms and cairo could produce png's 
but the thought of of recreating a dozen or so figures like this with 
cairo code sounds a bit painful.

At this point I'm a little unsure of the direction I should take.  Any 
thoughts?

Thanks and sorry for a somewhat long question.

-Dan