From kde-devel  Sat Aug 30 19:47:47 2003
From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Dirk_Sch=F6nberger?= <dirk.schoenberger () sz-online ! de>
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 19:47:47 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Customerize printing
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=106227354432712

Hi,

Nestal wrote,

> Dear all,

> I would like to add a KPrinter which will produce a PDF file when
printing.
> The current PDF printer in KDE is based on ghostscript, which is not very
> specilized in producing PDF files (it will convert all fonts to Type3
fonts
> which looks ugly in acrobat reader). I have written a small library called
> libpdf++ (libpdfxx.sourceforge.net) and I want to use it to write a
> specialized PDF printer for KDE.

> I suppose the KDE apps uses the KPrinter class for printing, so my
question is
> where to insert the PDF-producing code?

The basic rendering in Qt / KDE exists in the form of a QPainter /
QPaintDevice framework.
The KPrinter is a special QPaintDevice, like QWidget, QPrinter a.s.o. It is
used to proxy to multiple
printing queues, like LPng, CUPS a.s.o. Internally it uses an hard-coded
Postscript generating paint device.

So in order to integrate your PDF code generator, I suppose you have the
following options:

- implement a pure PaintDevice (inherit from QPaintDevice and wire the
operator implementations)
  Doing so would require application developers to explicitly call their
renderings with your paint device. I suppose
  this could be done via a standard action in an application GUI?

- make the generator in KPrinter changeable and provide your PDF generator
as some kind of special printer
  queue. This would involve changing KPrinter source code, I suppose.

Hope this helps,

Regards
Dirk


 
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