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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Negative review of koffice..
From:       "Tomas Furmonavicius" <f1926 () kaunas ! aiva ! lt>
Date:       2000-04-19 11:28:58
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On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 04:20:06PM -0400, Donovan Rebbechi wrote:
> 
> 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.

Maybe not in front but in between ;-)
 
> 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
> )

Well, I'm not sure about implementation.

> 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. 

Maybe.
 
> > > 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". 

Well, I've read it once again just to be sure, that there's nothing 
revolutionary in his words. He just said the same we all know - to get
WYSIWYG, you need to use the same fonts in windowing system and in
printing system. But userland applications (for example Office suit)
can't change the fonts supplied by windowing system and used in
printing system, so it's more a problem of OS, not application. 

> "Printing mechanism"  consists
> of many different things , of which the driver layer is only one. And no,
> GNOME are not reimplementing the driver layer.

Let me cite Miguel's words:

3. Native drivers (no need to generate Postscript first and manually process
   with Ghostscript a file for your printer, which has many problems from the user
   perspective, from the efficiency point of view, and from the quality point of
   views). 

   Currently the GNOME printing architecture includes a Postscript driver, an
   on-screen preview driver, a generic RGB driver (that can be used to generate
   images), a meta-file driver, and a black-and-white HP PCL driver (which
   needs work, and yes, we could use some help making more native drivers ;-). 

So, they _are_ reimplementing driver level.

Tomas

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