[Desktop_architects] Printing Summit 2006

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 11:49 -0500, Michael Sweet wrote:
> 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>

We need to do this for Firefox, which will be all-cairo in a year, and
the Win32 printing story is one of our three biggest cairo worries. (The
other ones are the Mac backend and general performance.) It's not simply
a matter of hooking the existing Win32 backend up to a print DC, because
Windows print DCs don't support all the operations screen DCs do (e.g.,
alphablend). We probably need some sort of meta-surface analysis like
Postscript is going to have. Then it's not clear whether this support
should be dropped into the existing Win32 backend or it would make more
sense to fork off a new Win32 printing backend. Anyway, we'll have to
solve it one way or another.

Rob