On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 02:53:17PM +0300, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote: > Nadav Har'El wrote: > >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.
Actually: a different X server. > > 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. An X client may use any X server, and any X printing server, in theory. > > 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? ;-) http://xprint.mozdev.org/ Doesn't yet work for me, though. -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= 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]
