Re: [Gramps-devel] GRAMPS Bounty update

[Alex R. <sh...@al...>]

Don,

On 03/22/2004 11:11:15 AM, Don Allingham wrote:
> Direct printing and print preview is a major new enhancement to the
> project. I will try to post screenshots later this evening.

I was thinking about the earlier plans to obsolete reportlab's PDF
plugin and the PS plugin. Now that we have a working gnome-print =20
plugin, I'm starting to doubt whether we should remove reportlab and =20
PS, even when LPRDoc becomes production quality in the future.

The reason is that, being fully internationalized, gnome-print embeds =20
the fonts within PS/PDF. This is about the only choice for non-latin =20
output, but is a huge overhead for latin-only contents.

As Frode Jemtland noticed, the latin-only PDFs created with reportlab =20
are a lot smaller than the ones created by LPRDoc.

So, the question for the near future is: whether we want to have one =20
way of creating PDFs (gnome-print) and pay the unnecessary overhead =20
when using latin text, or whether we leave an option for latin contents =20
to use reportlab plugin producing leaner PDFs. The reportlab is an =20
extra dependency, of course.

I personally would keep both. Since they're plugins, not having the =20
appropriate backend (reportlab or gnomeprint)  would rule out using the =20
corresponding plugin. That way the users can always choose the backend =20
fitting their needs.

As always, the trade-off is between the choice versus user-intuitive =20
setup. With too many choices things quickly become confusing, =20
especially for the new users.

What are the thoughts about the PDF creation in the future gramps?

Alex

--=20
Alexander Roitman   http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html
Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building
2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN  55455
Tel (612) 625-7566   FAX (612) 626-9201