libkdeprint

[Hans Meine]

Am Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2007 14:53:00 schrieb Kurt Pfeifle:
> There is currently *NO* program that is shovelling other files than
> PostScript files towards KDEPrint.
>
> What possibly *WILL* happen is that some programs will start to be
> able to output PDF for printing and hand PDF to the printing system.
>
> However, any sane program and its non-naive programmer will keep a
> degree of backward compatibility over quite a few years and make sure
> that they will be able to send PostScript to the printing system.

OK, maybe someone should try to explain QPrinter to you, since you wrote:
> > although they should ideally draw to
> > a QPainter.
>
> I don't understand that either; but it seems a technicality I can't
> understand without becoming a coder.

QPrinter is basically an abstraction layer that provides drawing commands.  An 
application that uses QPrinter will automatically work with PS, PDF, and 
Windows GDI backends which are provided by Qt.

> If they don't, they'll be screwed in a lot of use cases. Because
> there simply *ISN'T* yet any printing system around that is expec-
> ting PDF by default, or as the exclusive input.

Nobody wants to go from PS to PDF.  The direction is from PS-files to 
QPrinter-commands, which are then translated to anything that works.

The problem is that apps which formerly used non-Qt tools for generating 
Postscript now need to find a way to send that to a printer, as translating 
PS into QPrinter commands would mean re-writing ghostscript using the Qt API 
AFAICS.

Ciao, /  /
     /--/
    /  / ANS