[Gimp-print-devel] Printing & KDE

[Waldo B. <ba...@kd...>]

Hiya,

I was alerted that you guys were looking for KDE people. Well, I am a KDE 
person :-) I have no specific printing knowledge, so be gentle with me.

There isn't too much to tell about printing & KDE unfortunately. There is 
little active development in this area at the moment. The basic idea is that 
printing is done trough Qt which generates postscript. /etc/printcap is 
parsed to generate a list of printer you can choose from and the user can 
select the page size.

I have been looking around a bit tonight at CUPS and Corel's sysAPS (System 
and Application Print Services). Both look promising and should fit nicely 
together. 

I guess that CUPS basically uses ghostscript in some fashion as a kind of 
printer-driver. That makes the following chain:

1) printer driver  (ghostscript) 
2) transport layer (CUPS)
3) abstraction layer (sysAPS)
4) KDE (?)

The advantage of sysAPS for KDE is that we don't have to write support for 
different transport layers. Especially if GNOME uses sysAPS as well, we can 
achieve a high level of compatility between the two desktops in that area.
I have no idea what the plans of GNOME are wrt printing though.

The disadvantage of so many layers is that new, more advanced features 
require adaptions in multiple layers before you can use them at the 
application level.

Cheers,
Waldo