Nadav Har'El wrote on 2003-06-30: > 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). > AFAIK, the NeWS system that orginated this was closed and proprietary and inevietably lost the critical mass of the developer share to the open X although most agreed that NeWS was more elegant (see also http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/NeWS.html). The (unrealted but probably inspired, according to your link) NeXT environment was a bit more successful but was tied to NeXT's hardware (later - to Apple's?), with similar results. I think the current low profile of OpenStep and similar efforts are consequences of the small developer share although technically there little reason why they shouldn't succeed over X... Apple's toolkits still use PS and run well on OS X, don't they? Or doesn't OS X natively run over X?
-- Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Reading the documentation I felt like a kid in a toy shop." -- Phil Thompson on Python's standard library ================================================================= 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]
