libkdeprint

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 16 October 2007, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 October 2007, Alex Merry wrote:
> > On Tuesday 16 Oct 2007, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, 16. October 2007, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > > > From what Pino said so far I guess they let poppler do the
> > > > rendering and fetch a pixmap to be displayed in okular's viewport.
> > > > And of course using that pixmap for printing will produce bad
> > > > results.
> > >
> > > Given that oKular can zoom pretty close, I assume that poppler can
> > > produce arbitrarily sized renderings? Such as, renderings with a
> > > resolution that matches those of printers?
> > >
> > > Sure, printing whole-page images will be slow as hell... but it would
> > > work.
> >
> > It could be a solution.  It wouldn't be ideal, because really we want to
> > send a document with fonts and text to the printer, rather than just an
> > image (you can do this with QPrinter/QPainter, as far as I can tell,
> > but the external libraries don't have any way of providing the
> > necessary information to do so).
> 
> Well, printing pixmaps can't be that bad, otherwise it would be pretty 
> impossible to print images from image manipulation programs.

Yeah, but printing pixmaps at screen resolution is awful, so you need
high-resolution pixmaps (such as those you get when scanning or with a digital
camera), and those can take a long time and a lot of memory to print,
compared to just printing text using text-printing commands.
And I mean a lot - to the point where it's just not useable, depending on
the size of the generated pixmap and the available memory.
Anyway; let's see what John has in mind; otherwise I like Tobias' solution too.

But in all cases I would have preferred that kdelibs still has a KPrinter, even
if it's just a QPrinter (by inheritance or composition), so that we don't have to
port all of KDE back to KPrinter later on...

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).