On Mon, Jun 30, 2003, Beni Cherniavsky wrote about "[OT?] Printing on X (was: Re: [Jog Offer] SGI is looking for a Xwindows hacker)":
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.
OK, I have a long wait until GCC 3.3 will finish compiling. Let me play devil'ss advocate here for a while:
I understand what you're saying, but what does X has to do with it?
I mean, X isn't a desktop manager, it's a much lower kind of entity. It just a way to draw graphics on displays, in the most transpraent way possible. It doesn't even bother with stuff like how windows look or widgets etc etc. instead it leaves this to other protgrams. Why should it be different fro printing?
Indeed, one can imagine printing handled in a very similar way to window managment in X: an "X print manager" is an X programs that can, if it happens to be there, "hijack" specific X windows of other apps that happen to prive an applicable window hint of type "WM_PRINT" or some such.
This, of course, is completly transparent to networking etc just as X window managemnt is. In fact, a window manager program might, if it choose to, also act as a Print manager. This is, I believe, the true X way to do printing.
The fact that people don't in fact use such a scheme, is evidence that they don't knwo any better, not that X designers are wrong - X tries to be simple and leave all the implmentation of other things to pther programs, as it should be.
Mind you, I have no idea if this can even be implemented with current X. It sounds to me that you can, but I'm inventing this as I'm typing here... it does sound an interesting concept, though? ;-)
Cheers, Gilad.
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