Re: gtk_print

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:04:19 -0400
Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 14:12 +0100, Chris Vine wrote:
> > On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:40:20 +0200 (CEST)
> > "Richard Boaz" <riboaz xs4all nl> wrote:
> > [snip] 
> 
>  [ ... snip snip snip ... ]
> 
> this sounds like a disaster of an API.
> 
> most other GTK/GDK APIs that involve things that ultimately come down
> to pixels seem to have variants that allow you to provide
> unstructured data and structured data, sometimes in multiple formats.
> there is often a way to get data directly from a file too.
> 
> a print API that hides all the hard work of printer discovery and
> configuration but then prevents you from pointing it at a file to get
> the data to be printed seems fundamentally broken.

On the issue of printing a postscript file under windows, I don't think
GTK+ should be expected to provide its own postscript interpreter, just
because windows does not natively support printing postscript in the
way that unix-like OSes do.

Postscript is more than just data: it is in effect a computer language.

Should GTK+ also, for example, provide for the printing of a text
file just by loading it?  Printing plain text with GtkPrintOperation is
relatively trivial, but it still requires rendering by hand to a cairo
surface using a pango layout and pango-cairo in the draw-page callback.
I think that is probably right.

Chris