Re: Print preview widget

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 12:46:22PM -0500, Cody Russell wrote:
> I was thinking that it would be nice if there was an integrated print
> preview widget in GTK+, that would be available cross-platform and
> wanted to check with people here before I commit much time to this.
> Right now we're spawning another process to do this, and I think an
> integrated widget would be much nicer.
> 
> Thoughts?

+1

1) It allows user modification from within previewer
    - page re-ordering
    - inserting page breaks

2) It would help get preview working on win32, generating an emf is
   and using the viewer is not workable.

The main upside to the current approach is that it avoids the
unacceptably vast memory footprint from libgnomeprintui's preview.
It would record a stream of drawing cmds _in memory_ and replay them
for the preview.   For a large or complex file (eg a spreadsheet
with gridlines) that can get very large very quickly.  An external
backing store avoids that problem by pushing it off to the viewer,
and assuming that it is efficient about loading only the required
elements.  A cross platform preview would be very nice, as long as
it avoided that pitfall.