Re: [xmlroff] GnomePrint as a possible xmlroff backend

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Dave Malcolm wrote at 27 Feb 2003 13:48:21 +0000:
 > I'm considering adding xmlroff support to a Gnome application I'm
 > working on (www.conglomerate.org).

A dream come true.

 > I'm wondering if there are any plans to support the GnomePrint API
 > within xmlroff, perhaps as an alternative backend to the PDFlib
 > backend?  As far as I can tell, it would involve refactoring FoDoc
 > into an abstract base class, with the current implementation as a
 > subclass (FoDocPDF?), with another subclass talking to a
 > GnomePrintContext (FoDocGnomePrint?).

That is why FoDoc exists.

The historical reason why xmlroff uses PDFlib is that when I started,
Pango and GnomePrint were a lot further apart than they are today and,
considering that the PDF generation should be a minor part of the XSL
formatter, I took the path that would get results the quickest and
implemented a PDFlib backend for Pango rather than a GnomePrint
backend.

All I really ever wanted was to be able to pass a PangoLayout to
GnomePrint and have it print.  Back when Pango and GnomePrint used
different font representations and each did its own thing about
locating and naming the fonts on the system, passing a PangoLayout to
GnomePrint wasn't an option.  Now that GnomePrint and Pango are
converging on using fontconfig (and FreeType2), it could be done more
easily.

Note that the fine print on the PangoPDF web pages says that an
eventual goal is to use GnomePrint.

 > This should enable us to get nice Gnome-ified print preview dialogs
 > etc, and hopefully we could then make both backends optional (my
 > users are likely to have GnomePrint installed, but not the PDFlib
 > and PangoPDF libs).

But currently you can't just pass a PangoLayout to GnomePrint, can you?

 > What do you think of this idea?  Is it worth me hacking a patch together?

More than worth it.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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