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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Negative review of koffice..
From:       Donovan Rebbechi <elflord () panix ! com>
Date:       2000-04-18 20:20:06
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On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Tomas Furmonavicius wrote:

> device independent output suitable for printing.
> It's standard for apps to generate Postscript. Then it's a task
> of underlying printing system to do actual printing. And yes, there's a
> problem to keep fonts used in windowing system (X) and  printing
> system in sync, but it's not a problem of Koffice or other userland
> apps (say Netscape).  
> It's possible to feed the same fonts both to X and Ghostscript (I have
> no experience with real Postscript printers) - and this is a solution.
> Question is how to make syncing of screen and printer fonts easy and 
> portable.

I think this is pretty much right. The idea is that you need some kind of
layer that sits in front of both X and ghostscript.

Now what Star office and applix do is have these cataloging systems which
are based on text config files that :
(1)	group fonts into famiies
(2)	map X11 fonts to postscript font names
(3)	make font metric files and outlines available to the app ( my
understanding is that X11 doesn't make all the font metric info available
)
The problem is that these text files use idiosyncratic and non-standard
formats. It would be much better if they used say a well documented XML
DTD.

About PS printers:
To print to a postscript printer, you really want to have the fnots
embedded in the postscript file. Perhaps there's away that you can have
ghostsciprt take care of this. 

> > to addressing the fact that UNIX cannot do "WYSIWYG typography", while the
> > GNOME camp not only have thought about it, but are actually doing
> > something.
> 
> Well, adding Yet Another Printing Mechanism will only make things worse.
> Unless they are going to write their own drivers for all printers
> around, or print to Postscript bitmap, they'll need to deal with
> Postscript font handling anyway.

Read what he says before you comment -- go to slashot, search
fo "Miguel", then go to "Miguel tells all". 
"Printing mechanism"  consists
of many different things , of which the driver layer is only one. And no,
GNOME are not reimplementing the driver layer.

-- 
Donovan

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