[Desktop_architects] Printing Summit 2006

[Michael Sweet]

Carl Worth wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 10:02:16 -0500, Michael Sweet wrote:
>> Both WIN32/GDI and Quartz already support printing contexts, so I'd
>> just expose that;
> 
> Yeah, I think all that's missing is someone knowledgeable to hook up
> what's needed within cairo here.

<raises hand>
I think that is something we will be interested in doing, particularly
with FLTK 2.0.
</raises hand>

>> FLTK 2.0 can also use Cairo (instead of X11) as the underlying API,
>> and if Cairo will support MacOS X and Windows then we may be able to
>> greatly simplify the toolkit!
> 
> If so, that would be another great success for cairo. (I think cairo
> success is measured by how much code any given application can throw
> away when it adopts cairo.)

 From the looks of things, it could greatly simplify a lot of our
code, both for FLTK and some other apps we develop (I'm thinking
of HTMLDOC, but at this point I don't know if Cairo has all of
the pieces we'll need - should be able to add it, though! :)

>> (somewhat off-topic - any work in Cairo to support "embedded"
>> displays?)
> 
> What kind of "embedded" displays do you have in mind? Cairo has an
> "image" backend that will draw to any chunk of memory you hand it,
> so that's general enough to do just about anything. The image backend
> doesn't support a lot of different image formats yet, but that's
> pretty easy to extend as demand for that grows.

People ask for DirectFB, NanoX, and other various "dumb framebuffer"
support at least once a week...

> There's also an experimental DirectFB backend for cairo that's about
> to be committed to cairo CVS. Feel free to followup with me privately,
> or even better, on cairo at cairographics.org if you have any more
> questions:

Yeah, I just subscribed and will be getting into this more over the
next few months.  I've also sent out an invitation to the FLTK
developers to take the lead on this (Bill Spitzak did the current
Cairo glue code), since I *am* a bit busy right now with new software
releases (CUPS 1.2, FLTK 1.1.7, HTMLDOC 1.9, ESP Print Pro 5,
Mini-XML 2.3, plus some other personal projects... :)

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com