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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Negative review of koffice..
From:       "Tomas Furmonavicius" <f1926 () kaunas ! aiva ! lt>
Date:       2000-04-18 18:59:28
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On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 01:42:51PM -0400, Donovan Rebbechi wrote:
> 
> This attitude isn't going to help you guys. I am very impressed
> with KOffice, but you'd do well to learn from what the Gnome guys are
> doing instead of touting your superiority.
> 
> I suggest you read the slashdot interview with Miguel and see what he says
> about Gnome-print. ( there's a part where I state the "WYSIWYG typography
> problem very clearly and he explains Gnome's approach to solving it )
> 
> UNIX has a fundamental problem with display/print unification, and naively
> expecting Qt to solve the problems for you isn't going to cut it.

Nobody expect Qt to handle printing. Task of Qt is to generate
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 posted questions about this on this very list and I must say I was
> surprised by the fact that noone appears to have given any serious thought
> 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.

Tomas

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