libkdeprint

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 October 2007 14:53:00 Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
>>> Unfortunately the requirements have risen a bit over the years;
>> No, Thomas, that's not exactly true.
> 
> Actually it is, 

It's not a nice way to just repeat what you said before (again without
any arguments), and suppressing may quote below that you would *really*
need to address, if you wanted to have a real discourse:

    #> Requirements are projected to rise a bit over the *coming* years.
    #> But we are still very far from it.



> I'm pretty sure I have a reasonably good knowledge of printing 
> due to my 10 years of experience in the field and I know for a fact that 
> producing a postscript file is entirely unhelpful for Windows printers, for 
> Macintosh printers and for applications that want to use features that are 
> not supported in postscript.

Which features are you talking about, exactly? Must be features
like better color management, support for transparency and better
font handling (my guess).

Otherwise it's a very cryptic statement.

May I conclude from that "...however, it is completely helpful for
Windows printers, for Macintosh printers and for applications that
want to use features like transparency, color management and WYSIWIG
font embedding for hi-fidelity printouts if we move to PDF as our
default output format".

If so, this is still only part of the solution. Because, yes, some
printer models out there do already start to consume PDF directly.
And their number will probably increase over the next 10 years. If
Microsoft doesn't get its way in pushing XPS to replace PDF in the
professional printing industry, and convince printer vendors to
build in XPS-consuming renderers into their devices.

And trust me, I've tested a few of these devices in my own profes-
sional life. Most of them don't support printouts PDFs that contain
transparencies. What they often do is print a big black square where
a transparency effect is visible on screen when opened in a good
PDF viewer.

Your trust in PDF and your keen-ness in supporting it is nice to see
(after all, *I* was the messenger who brought the 2006 Linux Desktop
Printing Summit agreement for moving towards PDF to some initial
publicity, ask Google or http://www.linux.com/articles/53732?tid=13
and I was amongst those who pushed for getting this goal to be ac-
cepted by the involved communities such as Ghostscript, CUPS and
other developer groups).

However, you can't pretend that if you move to PDF-only in your
application you'll have solved all current printing problems from
that moment and added all the missing features to the printing
process. It's the rest of the infrastructure that isn't yet there,
and any Qt4/KDE4 printing solution needs to take that into account.

A *lot* of printers in the next 10 years will still be non-PDF
consuming ones. And that's why we need a layer, somewhere on the
system that handles that as well.

> Anyway, thanks for kicking me. I'm out.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Maybe you can write a well-elaborated blog posting that addresses
these questions in a comprehensible way. I'm sure that others than
just me would also be interested to learn more about this topic.

-- 
Kurt Pfeifle
System & Network Printing Consultant ---- Linux/Unix/Windows/Samba/CUPS
Infotec Deutschland GmbH  .....................  Hedelfinger Strasse 58
A RICOH Company  ...........................  D-70327 Stuttgart/Germany