On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 22:53 +0100, Roger Leigh wrote: > 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. I think you are looking at a somewhat distorted sample of applications. :-). I think most application writers who want to print something would like to write code to draw what they want to print. Preferably using the same API as they are using to draw to the screen. Because it's been needed for libgnomeprint for things like ggv and gpdf, it's likely that a GTK+ API would contain a "backdoor" for sending raw PS to the selected printer, but that can't be cross-platform, and it certainly wouldn't be the primary interface. > 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. I this all can be kept hidden from applications so that if a better replacement for PPD files starts being used, it can just be dropped in transparently. Regards, Owen
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