Re: Problem with preview and the blocking print dialog

[Jody Goldberg <jody novell com>]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 04:51:48PM -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 17:42 -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> > I'm implementing the preview code in gtkprint.  I have decided to use an
> > external helper (default is evince) to do print preview.  The idea was
> > to write out to a pdf in /tmp and launch the external helper when the
> > user hits the preview button.
> 
> <ignorant>
> 
> Why do we have an external helper?
> 
> Gnome-print would save everything to its own internal metafile, and then
> it would spit it to a gnome-canvas.  Could we make Cairo just render
> everything to a preview window?
> 
> </ignorant>

This was a performance nightmare in libgnomeprint because it would
queue up the entire document in a metafile which could easily reach
into the hundreds of megs.  The new code is a huge improvement in
supporting per page rendering.  If that can avoid the overhead then
there are benefits to inline rendereing.  Some of the new features
Lutz added to gnomeprintui such as drag-n-drop page reordering and
subsetting are not really feasible with an external viewer.