print-dialog

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 12:25, Michael Knepher wrote:
> Is XPrint supposed to be a solution for this? I've only skimmed briefly
> over the info about the new xorg release at freedesktop.org, so I'm not
> sure if it would allow similar functionality.
> 

No, XPrint is an X server feature that lets you draw to the printer
using the same operations used to draw to the screen. Most of the Linux
desktop crowd thinks it's fundamentally a broken design, because the
drawing operations aren't vector-based and because it's in the X server
instead of being a library. So the alternative is something like Cairo
(in future) or right now the printing stuff in Qt and gnome-print. All
these things have to do with generating postscript; an orthogonal
question is how you get the postscript to the printer, which is most
simply done by feeding it to lpr, but there are more complex things
people also want to do.

Havoc