Re: [Tcllib-devel] Tcl GSoC 2011 - Ideas anyone ?

[Lars H. <Lar...@re...>]

Kevin Walzer skrev 2011-03-11 02.26:
> 2. Complete the PDF-generation projects from the past couple of summers,
> hook them up to native printing dialogs on each platform, and get the
> whole package into the core (or at least as a visible extension, I have
> no clue where the code currently exists). I can offer Mac-specific
> printer dialog code here:
> http://tk-components.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tk-components/cocoaprint/.

I haven't kept up-to-date with these developments, but generally, how do 
these projects stand on the axis of doing-stuff-themselves vs. 
relying-on-external-libraries (of which some are probably 
platform-specific)? A print dialog surely introduces some platform 
dependence, but what about the content generation parts? How much is tied 
into Tk, and how much can be used without?

For what it's worth, I've been doing some (pure-Tcl, though unpublished) 
work on parsing TrueType/OpenType files, particularly to the end of 
dumping metric and outline data, but I expect a lot of the effort could be 
reused in a PDF generation context. Font handling is otherwise likely to 
be an obstacle if going the doing-stuff-yourself route.

Lars Hellström