printing with pango and gnomeprint

Hi everyone,

I have been trying to work out why the gnome-print output does not match
that of our screen layout, and found the following two problems:

* gnomeprint uses internal resolution of 72dpi, and loads font-config
font map for Pango for the 72dpi. Unfortunately, typical X server these
days does not run at 72dpi; in my case, the server runs at 96, and hence
fonts that get loaded via Pango for screen get loaded at 96dpi, and the
difference in font metric at the two resolutions is significant. As far
as I know, the dpi used by the pango Xft module cannot be altered (and
shouldn't be either).

* gnomeprint turns off hinting on its pango font map, which at the low
resolution of 72dpi results in different metrics than with hinting on.
Turning hinting off for screen is not an option, as the resulting output
is very poor.

I cannot see any sensible way of hacking around this; what I think is
needed is for gnomeprint to allow me to load a fontmap at given dpi and
with hinting enabled, something like

PangoFontMap * gnome_print_pango_font_map_new_for_dpi (guint dpi,
gboolean disable_hinting);

Loading of the pango font map at arbitary resolution is simple to do,
but unfortunately the 72dpi seems to be assumed throughout gnomeprint,
so that doing so results in all coords conversions getting messed up,
and I am not sure how to best fix that in gnomeprint itself.

Tomas
Received on Mon Aug 28 12:52:01 2006