Re: Printing in GTK+

[Roger Leigh <rleigh whinlatter ukfsn org>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:

> On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 21:24 -0700, Todd Fisher wrote:
>> What about a cross-platform method for printing?
>
> There's some discussion of possible GTK+ future printing interfaces
> in my GUADEC paper:
>
> http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/guadec5/
>
> I think a fairly simple printing interface does makes sense for
> GTK+, but it's been long blocked on not having a rendering API
> that's suitable for printing.

It looks like there's a nice clean separation between two pieces:

1) A print dialog for selecting printers, paper sizes, printer
   features etc.

2) A rendering API to produce PS, PDF, SVG etc.

Most programs will want (1), but only some will need (2).  Most of the
programs I've written don't have any use for rendering (making no use
of the Canvas): they either output plaintext or do their own
printer-specific control, or use groff or TeX as the rendering
mechanism.  They would still find (1) very useful, to select the
output destination, paper size, print quality etc.


With regards to (1), I did have a chat with Jody Goldberg about this
in Bordeaux this summer.  One issue we have in the Gimp-Print project
is that the current mechanism of describing printer capabilities with
PPDs is no longer sufficient to describe a Gimp-Print driver, which
supports curves and value ranges which the PPD spec can't cope with.
This becomes a problem when you want to edit them in a portable
manner: currently only the GIMP Print UI is capable of this, leaving
CUPS and LPRng users unable to access the extended functionality on
offer.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh

                Printing on GNU/Linux?  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
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