Re: AbiWord Fork or Replacement that does not require libgnome*

> Lpr worked for me and when everybody "improved"
> things I went to lprng and when once again things
> were "improved"
> I went to cups. But the joker in the deck is that
> for me lpr
> worked just fine. Now what is so sexy about
> libgnomeprint I
> don't know. Does it spool and print pages? Heck that
> problem was
> solved a generation ago. I worked with lots of Xenix
> based
> systems in the 1980s and none had problems with
> printing.
> Some had terminals hanging off of them, some were
> standalone.

Ok, I'll bite.

So, do we depend on lprng or cups? Or just lpr being
available on the command line, and communicate to it
over a pipe?

Ok, then what about listing the available printers,
their descriptions, and their statuses. That's done
differently for the above printing systems.

What about discovering what paper sizes and trays
exist? And presenting a UI on top of it?

Ok, now say I want to do something fancy like color
normalization. I need the printer's IPP profile. lpr
won't give me that.

Or figuring out what the printer's writable margins
are.

That's not even getting involed with content
generation, but let's go there since we're having so
much fun.

Let's create a page with some translucent content. PS
doesn't support that, so we'll either need to handle
it ourselves or let something smarter (like
gnomeprint) do it for us, and composite over the
paper's color.

Or let's try to use other PDF 1.4 drawing model
constructs, like gradients and patterns. Can't do
that, can it? I don't want to handle that myself.

Or handle Unicode text without having to define our
own PS printing macros.

Or smartly embed a subsets of OpenType, Type1, Type42,
and TrueType fonts all in the same doc. Especially
subsetting CJK fonts that are a few dozen MBs large.

Or print to a PDF, without making my mom run ps2pdf.

Or do a print preview, without having to probe the
filesystem for one of 'gv|ggv|ghost|...' and muck
around with temporary, intermediate files.

And present a sane and consistent interface to these
features across applications that "just works".

But I've only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

Sure, your teletype printer could call LPR. But you
didn't need to worry about any of these things back
then. "lpr foo.txt" is fundamentally uninteresting.

Times have changed. Requirements have changed.
Adjusting our dependency list by *1 freakin'
dependency* to meet these changing requirements isn't
so bad.

Get over your GNOME phobia.

Dom

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Received on Wed Feb 22 00:02:48 2006