On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 09:49 -0700, Tom Epperly wrote:
Sure, send the pointers. Do you have a guess how long such a change would take to make? I would like to know what I am getting myself into if I decide to attempt to do this.
Sorry to take so long on this, it got lost in my mail.
Probably the best place to start is in the postscript printer extension. It houses some of the postscript code, but my understanding is that unfortunately not all of it. I know that Kees was having problems upgrading the GNOME-Print driver because some of the interface involved taking in Postscript operators. But, I believe that there is already the feature to render the whole page as a bitmap in there. It is none the less, a good place to start.
http://inkscape.org/doc/doxygen/html/classInkscape_1_1Extension_1_1Internal_...
As far as Lauris previously implementing it, I don't remember that. And the Postscript output has remained largely the same from Sodipodi. Lauris designed the Print Extension interface, all I did is translate it in to C++. The other feature that has been added deals with text, but I don't remember any regressions from that. I do believe that Lauris was involved in the beginnings of GNOME-Print, so it may have worked at some time through that interface.
Tom, it's hard to say how long it will take. If I were going to guess, I'd say a good 20 programming hours for me. You've got the disadvantage that you need to learn more about the internals than I do... I also don't know what your experience is.
While I'd agree with Bulia that I would be more excited if you were saying that you wanted to make PDF 1.5 output, updates the Postscript output will be accepted. I think that quality printing support is a place where Inkscape is currently lacking.
--Ted