Re: [Gimp-print-devel] What direction should we be headed?

[Michael S. <mi...@ea...>]

[And here I finally got subscribed, was about to post a long well-
worded response to this thread, and Netscape crashed...  sigh...]

OK, I'm finally "back" to contribute to the print plug-in...  Here
are my thoughts on the future direction of the plug-in and Linux
printing in general:

    1. GIMP and all other applications need a high-level printing
       interface; the GNOME and KDE efforts in this area should
       provide it.

    2. Filtering, printer drivers, color management, etc. should
       not be done by the user.  Aside from security issues, doing
       filtering in user-space makes accounting and other "corporate"
       issues more difficult to address.  We need corporate support
       for Linux to become a mainstream OS (read your computer
       history as to why the IBM PC became so popular despite
       technically superior alternatives)

    3. Legacy applications  (like my crashing Netscape) need to be
       able to access printers through standard commands.

    4. Putting printer drivers in applications is a mistake.  Too
       many application suffer from bloat already, there are all
       sorts of legal (licensing) issues that would be involved,
       and cause problems addressed in #2 and #3.

    5. Good printer drivers are hard to write.  Each printer
       requires a lot of coding and tweeking to make the output
       come out well.

    6. Printer manufacturers are going to provide little or no
       support for our efforts.  My company has enough trouble
       getting information from the various companies for a
       commercial product; NONE of them want to develop or
       support an open-source product right now for their
       entry-level products.

That said, I think future development should go in the direction
of creating a standard set of high-quality printer drivers that
can be used for GIMP, CUPS, Ghostscript, etc.  My personal bias
is of course towards the CUPS-based driver, but I think the
driver internals can be abstracted so that CUPS, GIMP, Ghostscript,
etc. can use the same code so that all applications can take
advantage of the high-quality drivers.

My $0.02.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products                  mi...@ea...
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com