gEDA-user: pcb printing

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been asked about pcb printing under win32 which we don't directly 
support.

I'm wondering if the following makes any sense or not.  I'm not actually 
that likely to get to work on on this much but wanted to toss out the 
ideas in case anyone felt inspired.

GTK provides a printing API.  The quick summary is the printing dialog 
box as well as a page setup dialog box are provided as part of this. 
Under unix-like operating systems it works well with cups, or plain old 
lpd.  You get a real printer selection choice.  Under win32, you get the 
native looking win32 print dialog.

In the callbacks that a user app has to provide for drawing a page, you 
are able to get a cairo_t* do draw into.  You just do the drawing with 
cairo calls and presto, you have linux/BSD/win32 printing support.

You also get postscript and pdf output from this as well.

My questions are

1)  is this actually a useful enough feature for people to warrant 
putting any time into it?  One thing we would probably be able to do 
better than now is support layer transparency.

2) does it make sense, and I think it probably does, for this to be a 
cairo HID and that HID depends on gtk (not the gtk HID, but the gtk 
libraries) to provide the print dialogs.  The advantage of using the gtk 
print dialogs is they are there, they work on linux and win32, and we 
don't have to maintain our own.

3) can we do a layering sort of thing where we have a cairo HID that 
does not use gtk at all and then in the gtk HID, we can implement a call 
to the gtk print dialog and in the lesstif HID we somehow call the cairo 
HID to generate postscript to a file or lpr or pdf to a file?

anything else we should consider if such an effort were undertaken?

-Dan




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