On Tuesday 17 August 2004 16:33, Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 08:23, Alan Horkan wrote:
if some one had time to evaluate the gnome-print support that we carried over from Sodipodi and make sure it works properly that would provide us with another way to generate PDF but it is unlikely to be as good as what Scribus produces.
Correct. Not to brag, but really the PDF engine in Scribus is really remarkable. In my testing with DTP pre-press tools really the quality now matches and in some cases exceeds some DTP apps.
Last I checked, GNOME-Print support worked, but it has no GUI. So that basically means that you can't select anything to make PDF (or SVG for that matter). I think that no one ported the support to a GTK+ 2.x version of GNOME-Print. This would be a good, pretty straightforward project if someone wanted to take it on. I know that Kees has looked into it before.
--Ted
The problem for both gnome print and kprinter for that matter is they are highly dependent on the version of Ghostscript to support certain PS3/PDF features. SVG and Inkscape make it trivial to create these objects, which are difficult to render directly to print.
Most distros ship the ESP version of Ghostscript which is patched to work with CUPS. ESP GS is at 7.07 atm. The default build for CUPS is PS2 postscript. CUPS will only build PS3 support with a ./configure switch.
The latest AFPL GS is 8.14 and 8.30beta1, which will eventually be GS 8.50. There are many many improvements, especially with higher end PS3/PDF1.4 features in GS 8.x, in some cases really impressive.
Even then, both gnome-print and kprinter often still won't support all PDF 1.4 features like true transparency and some kinds of graidents and blends.
AFAIK, no other OSS app really can do this besides Scribus and until distros start shipping more capable CUPS/GS setups, this situation is not likely to improve.
That is not to say it would not be worth adding real support for gnome-print. An alternative is to build direct support for CUPS into Inkscape directly.
Despite the limitations noted above, this does have some advantages to consider:
It eliminates another layer of dependencies and according to Franz, was not really difficult. Adding cups-devel and sometimes open-ssl-devel is much easier than adding all the gnome print library support. I know this from building the RH and Suse rpms :)
When installed, you can directly access the GIMP print driver features with CUPS. GIMP print 5.0 in testing looks really promising. In addition, it might make color matched printing a bit easier. IMO, this would benefit a large number of users with typical inkjets.
CUPS is natively supported on MacOSX and there are alternative ways to handle printing/PDF export on Win32.
Just some thoughts and observations to consider.
Cheers, Peter