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

[Thomas T. <tt...@bi...>]

Robert L Krawitz wrote:

> Ghostscript is ugly as sin.  It's precisely the monolithic giant that
> Mike refers to.  It's a maintenance nightmare.  It has to be
> recompiled for every new output device you want to add.  Yes,
> recompiled. 

Ghostscript - or any other application for that matter - could use an
output format that basically says 'print this pixmap here and print that
little bit there' and pipe it to our driver. By using smaller pixmaps
(or maybe even parts as bitmaps which will be rendered in black or some
other color) we may keep performance okay as we do not send all the
'white' through the interface. I have a feeling Ghostscript is doing
this internally already.

The output could be in the form of your favourite pixmap format
interleaved with formatting commands. If this format is kept simple, it
should be easy enough to get new frontends to support this.

New backsends are just a pipe to the new Ghostscript with the blocked
output driver.

Or would this still be to inefficient? I also see an open area with
printer control etc, page size, quality settings (how does the
information about printer capabilities go up all the way to the user
interface? Maybe a stupid system: the driver is always identified via
full (network) path name and can be queried directly).

> We have good drivers.  But in infrastructure, we're weak.

I think a form of concensus is needed: we all need each other.
Interfaces would help: we'd have a low level driver interface and
probably various application interfaces. Then there are 2 network
interfaces right now.

> But in the
> long run, projects such as this simply MUST get absorbed into the
> infrastructure.  In my opinion, of course.

And that infrastructure would better be general. A lot of apps can only
print PostScript: so Ghostscript should be part of that infrastructure.
The Gimp plugin would be the first app fully excercising the printer
control features, something sorely missing from Ghostscript. I think it
needs some very straightforward thinking. Why, for example, doesn't
Ghostscript allow folks to change some command line parameters through
(say) PostScript comments? Should save lots of folks all those printer
queues for 300 dpi, 600 dpi, color, etc.


Thomas