Future of KPrinter

[Joseph Wenninger]

On Thursday 13 September 2007 22:40, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Joseph Wenninger wrote:
> >If the filters are about to disappear, will the QPrinter class be able
> > to handle booklet/pamphlet printing internally ? It would be a shame if
> > that would not be possible any more in the normal printing workflow
>
> How do you do that in a cross-platform manner?

To my knowledge ghostscript and the psutils run on all platforms we support 
and at least on windows ghostscript can talk to winprint, I guess on macosx 
it's the same. So one solution would be
App->PS->psutils->ghostscript (okay cups) ->native printer (similiar how 
kprint does it on my linux box)
On the other hand it doesn't make sens to me to limit all platforms because 
some don't support all features. Is HAL available on windows ?

hmm, perhaps that should be a cups feature though, like on windows the virtual 
printerdriver fineprint (fineprint.com).

As long as I can print to a postscript file, which I can't do with qt4, at 
least assistant can't do it, I can use some shellscripts for automating 
booklet printing, so at least that feature should be implemented in the new 
printing system

> Or, a simpler question: how do you do them with PDF?

I've yet to see a home or small office printer understanding PDF. Most of them 
if at all understand PS, so for printing it is no problem. If I want a PDF 
document I guess I have to live with some limitations, just if I'm printing a 
color document  to a fax queue for a black/white fax. It will lose it's 
colors.

Kind regards
Joseph Wenninger

-- 
Been there, done that
KATE developer - Joseph Wenninger <jowenn at kde.org>