On Tue, 2002-07-16 at 07:14, Vik Olliver wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 16:27, Michael JasonSmith wrote:
> > 1. Separation of the print and display systems was a costly mistake.
> > (A lot of the problems stem from this design decision.)
>
> It has allowed several competing schemes for printing to evolve. This is
> a necessary process in Open Source software.
There is one (1, I, 00000001) printing system used in OpenSource
Software: PostScript. I know of four ways to get the PostScript file to
the printer (lpr, lpr-NG, Cups, and raw) but all the user-level software
relies on the underlying printing system understanding PostScript at
some level.
> > 1.1 Fonts are far too difficult to install.
>
> Have you used the KDE font manager?
No, I've had a poke and I cannot find the Debian package. I guess that
it is trying to solve the same problem as Deforma and the other font
managers. However, they all suffer the same problem: the font manager
has to know about every program that wants fonts installed, what
font-types the program can accept, and how to install the fonts for the
program.
If you get a program that the font manager does not know about, then you
are screwed. If a new version of the program comes out, then you are
screwed. If you want to install a font and the program cannot
understand it, then you are screwed.
It should not be that difficult.
> > 1.2 For the programer, printing is hard to do.
> >
> > 1.3 WYSIWYG is impossible. (Bug, or not :) )
>
> StarOffice/OpenOffice seems to manage it and numerous programs have
> print preview.
No, they don't. They guess what the output would look like, they have
no guarantee that the output would look anything like the
print-preview. For example, they do not know what paper sizes your
printer can handle (damn US Letter).
> > 2. X is too hard to configure for a newbie. (Fantastic for an
> > expert, on the other hand.)
>
> Which bit is too hard? RH 7.x, Mandrake and SuSE install it for the
> user.
Except we seem to have all these people complaining about not being able
to change resolution... I've never had much problem setting up X, give
or take a poor diver choice, but setting up X does seem to cause a
number of people a lot of grief.
> > 3. No consistent widget set (Xt, Motif, Tk, QT, GTK+...).
>
> Necessary in an Open Source environment. The best one wins.
Agreed, the multiple widget sets are a necessary evil, but an evil none
the less. A newbie has to learn the little oddities about every widget
set, which is a problem. What am I saying; everyone uses GNOME :)
> Motif and Tk are mainly of archaic interest these days.
Acroread, or most other commercial GUI products.
> > 4. Lack of standards for "fancy" UI features, such as Drag and drop,
> > clipboard, global menus, tasklists...
>
> D&D is a window manager issue, not X.
Drag and drop is a widget-set thing, like cut and paste. When the drag
starts the X selection (what X a calls clipboards) called
"XdndSelection" is grabbed. When the drag finishes the data is copied
out of "XdndSelection" into the target program. No window managers are
involved at any stage. See
http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/
for more information on Xdnd.
However, X does not support drag-and-drop: it is a *convention* adopted
by KDE and Gtk+.
> There is a clipboard
I was not saying there wasn't. However, X does not specify how the
*multiple* clipboards should be used. The whole middle-mouse paste was
a defacto-standard started by the Xt widget set. It was only in the
last year or so that Cut and Paste started to work across multiple
widget sets because the KDE and GNOME crowds sat down and sorted the
mess out. It was only with the release of KDE 3 *this*year* that KDE
finally started using the convention!
> > 5. Lack of multi-media support (such as sound synchronisation).
>
> Numerous media players seem to have this one sorted, but it's not
> really an X issue.
X displays images, therefor keeping the images in-sync with other parts
of the system it is an X issue :) Most of the media players display
images and hope for the best. There is no elegance to the system to
support multi-media. BeOS, with its real-time support and multimedia
synchronisation, had it sorted.
--
Michael JasonSmith http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~mpj17/
