Re: AbiWord's printing architecture

[Leonard Rosenthol]

At 10:54 PM +0100 1/26/03, Robert Roebling wrote:

 > 1) The "printer" is no longer able to using the

 hinting data in the font to do better quality
 output on raster devices and/or lower resolution
 PS printers.

How much of a reality is that?

Depends on the situation.

Also, I personally would love to see wxWindows support direct PS generation on non-Unix platforms so that you'd get better quality output on Windows (etc.) AND could also easily move to direct PDF output for all platforms.

I use this for printing
on Linux with ghostscript.

To what type of printer? Are you using something like the GimpPrint extentions or just direct through GS? What version of GS?

I haven't even seen a printer
which does less than 300dpi and most do far more. I'm
also not sure what rendering engine GhostSript uses,

Depends on the version of GS. They are in the midst of switching over all the graphics subsystems for the 8.0 series - including moving to FreeType for the font renderer.

but I'm not sure it is so much better than FreeType's and
that is what Pango uses to create the outlines.

Pango just gets the outline data from FT - it doesn't read the hint tables, etc.

 > As Dom noted, the correct thing to do is support
 > font embedding with subsetting.

I didn't find any info on this yet, but doesn't
that mean that the printing code has to scan the
whole printout which glyphs have been used and
it will then dump all those glyphs into the PS
file?

	Correct.

I am particularly concerned about the order
of things as I suspect that the glyph data has
to be at the top of the PS file and the actual
text comes later.

	Nope, not necessary...

BTW, does AbiWord do this glyph subsetting?

I believe that Dom was working on (completed?) support for this in AbiWord ...


LDR
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://www.lazerware.com>