Re: The printing work has been merged

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 02:08 -0600, Yevgen Muntyan wrote:
>
> > Hey,
> >
> > First of all, I implemented some printing in my application,
> > and it works!
>
>
> Cool! Did you like the API?

I followed print-editor.c, so I subclassed GtkPrintOperation and
I do stuff in begin-print and draw-page methods; it works fine.
But, I do not understand how can a library provide "printing".
It seems inappropriate for a text widget to create a GtkPrintOperation
object; and it seems natural (maybe after gnomeprint?) to delegate
the real job to some PrintJob object which could be sent to a printer,
or used inside of PrintOperation methods. E.g. it feels just wrong
that drawing happens in the method of an object which also shows Print
dialog. I looked at GtkPrintJob, but it seems to be rather internal
auxiliary class not intended for using in application code.
Maybe it's just my misunderstanding, but documentation is not very
clear ;)

From the other hand, this straight prepare-and-print way is awesome.
I love how it's easy to print a text document.

In any case, it would be really cool if you wrote some five-steps
printing howto or a rough description of what doing what.

> Do we want to expose a write-to-ps to everyone? PDFs are a well known
> way to send pre-rendered page layouts as files, but postscript is much
> less widely known. 

Well, in our department network consisting of linux machines, xerox
postscript printers, and lpr, postscript is widely known. I personally
need postscript much more than pdf here, since I can create postscript
file, ssh to some department machine, and send the file to print using
lpr. If I have pdf, I use wonderful acrobat reader to print file to PS,
and so on.

And well, postscript is not something ancient and forgotten. People
dealing with TeX know about postscript. "postscript is much less widely
known" is rather like "MS Word format is very well known".

> Technically it would be easy to make the pdf backend be a general
> backend that had a pdf or ps setting in the advanced tab. I'm just not
> sure if exposing that is a good idea. Opinions?

I believe it should be a well-visible option in the dialog, like a combo
with PS and PDF in the list. It's really a "I press Print and choose
Print to PS" thing, not something set once and forgotten forever (of
course dialog must remember last choice).

Best regards,
Yevgen