On Sunday, 8 September 2013 at 22:37:00 UTC, Ramon wrote:
On Sunday, 8 September 2013 at 21:47:59 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic
wrote:
On 9/8/13, Ramon <s...@thanks.no> wrote:
Fox and fltk are
nice little thingies but not up to (todays) par lacking even
functionality like printing.
Printing seems like something that should be in a separate
library,
and maybe the GUI library would provide a nice interface over
its
functionality. I've no idea, but are there no such
cross-platform
libraries around?
For some reason, probably to follow the situation on Windoze,
printing is considered to belong to or at least to be very
tightly coupled with the GUI. Technically speaking MS has
solved printing by drawing to a "special canvas", which is
somewhat unfortunate but actually not that bad conceptionally.
In part the problem is also to do with linux going another way
that is smart, too, by somewhat decoupling printing and going
for postcript.
Postscript is/was the industry standard, so of course Linux,
Unix, FreeBSD and most other OSs support it, including windows.
The "special canvas" in windows is really just another GDI render
target. Cairo works in a similar way, producing device
independent output that can then be used with different renderer
targets, including Postscript, PDF, etc.
G.
