On Mon, Jun 30, 2003, Beni Cherniavsky wrote about "[OT?] Printing on X (was: Re: [Jog Offer] SGI is looking for a Xwindows hacker)": > Since I never wrote a program that prints something, I take no stance > on whether directly emitting PostScript or using the windowing > system's calls is an easier way to program printing. NeXTStep comes
The reason I wanted printing support in the ICCCM was not because I wanted to avoid Postscript (in fact, I like Postscript). The issue that bothered me was that the basic idea behind X was that the applications I am running can run on different machines and communicate through the X server. When one application wants to print (and similary, play sounds) it should not use that remote's machine printer, or the "PRINTER" environment variable on the remote machine, but rather it should have sent the file to print to some "Printer Manager" through the standard X-Windows communication mechanisms. People that say "X communication is slow", "we better have direct TCP communication", "there's the LPR protocol" forget that not only is setting up direct communication a mess (you need to seperately configure every account you have), in many cases it is completely impossible because the seperate machines have no TCP/IP connection. The "modern" example to think of is SSH's X forwarding - when you have an X connection but cannot make direct TCP connections because of firewalls. > to mind as a surprising POV on the issue ;). Both approaches have > interesting impacts for cross-platform / cross-toolkit applications. Reminds me of Sun's Sunview and "Display Postscript" extension on X. The idea there was that you'd use postscript both for on-screen display and for printing later. For some reason, this idea never caught on. (see also http://www.postscript.org/FAQs/language/node73.html). -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jun 30 2003, 30 Sivan 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Live as if you were to die tomorrow, http://nadav.harel.org.il |learn as if you were to live forever. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
