Re: gtk_print

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Sat, 2008-08-23 at 00:28 +0100, Chris Vine wrote:
> 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.

aha. a very fair point, and one that is highly relevant to the OP's
question. Richard, i think you need to think carefully about how you
would print this file *outside* of GTK. if selecting a printer and
identifying the file to be sent there is not enough to get the job done,
its a bit hard to expect GTK to go the extra mile and work this way.