printing in gnome port

Subject: printing in gnome port
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 13:23:44 CST

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Hi,

I just tried the gnome port first time today. I was very frustrated by the
printing. I was experimenting with 0.7.13 release notes file, applying various
formatting changes to some paragraphs (like text color, fill color). The
Gnome-print is far from ready I think (or implementation of printing via
gnome-print in AW is not complete):

* It looks like gnome print (or AW when using GP) doesn't support color in any
  way (and even shades of gray). Though I didn't configure my GP at all (it
  was using all "factory presets" - I was using a ximian's package) - may be
  it possible..

* Printing with symbol fonts doesn't work - symbols disappear in .ps generated
  by gnome-print (i.e., they will be absent on the paper), and seen as squares
  in print preview (tested under english locale too, so it's not
  locale-specific). This means printing of lists is broken - you get NO
  bullets in lists!

* It seems GP doesn't support ttf printing in any way. Also printing
  of non-latin1 texts is not supported (in fact, looking at the source of GP
  should work for single-byte encoding, but AW currently ignores any
  non-iso-8859-1 chars when printing to GP). Not to say about BiDi..

Considering all this I think it would be wiser to provide PS generation
ability in the gnome port (e.g. under menu "Print directly" - just enable the
compilation of the sources and hook that gtk dialog to this menu item), or
even don't use GP at all for now. It seems all linux distibutors will ship
gnome version of AW, so we will get VERY BAD perception for things we are not
really guilty. Anyway, it's too rude for out users to force them hunting for
pure gtk version of AW for their distribution in order they to be able to
print normally. It's unfair an should be fixed.

Another option is not to recomment gnome port to the users...

What do you think about this?

Let's respect our users if we want any...

Best regards,
-Vlad

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