Hi, Ghee Teo <ghee.teo at sun.com> on Wed, 26 Apr 2006 wrote: > > I have not heard any plan to do these work in Solaris/openSolaris. > As far as I know there isn't community activity to support this on the GNOME > printing libraries either. Currently, the only support that for MS Windows on > GNOME printing is for GDI. Essentially an obejct to wrap around the calls to > MS Windows dll. The person who implemented this is: > Ivan, Wong Yat Cheung <email at ivanwong.info> > > No sure wherther he is active in this anymore. > > Is there specific reasons you are looking for this? > Am curious to find out?
No not really, it's just out of interest as in an earlier life at Sun I had an interest in the 'Solaris Printing System'. So for what it's worth here is my take on XPS .... XPS will be part of MS Windows Vista (and back ported to XP) when it is released later this year (or whenever). This will probably make XPS become the defacto standard for portable documents within a number of years replacing PDF, ie. lots of windows PCs means lots of XPS document files. So, sooner rather than later, Solaris/OpenSolaris/Linux/etc will need a XPS viewer and method of printing XPS document files. In the longer term application will probably also need to be able to create XPS document files. From the Solaris Printing System point of view, it probably means that it needs to handle XPS formatted files. Solaris 9 & 10 currently use 'a2ps' (via foomatic-rip) to convert files to the required printer PDL. So I guess Solaris will wait until the opensource community has updated 'a2ps' to be able handle XPS before the printing system can handle it. In the future, if companies like Global Graphics have their way, some printers will have XPS as their inbuilt PDL. So the Solaris Printing System will have to be able to convert other file formats to XPS to be able to print to these XPS printers. Personally I don't think that this is likely to happen in a big way though (but I may be wrong). Paul > > > Paul Cunningham <paulcun at talk21.com> on Fri, 07 Apr 2006 wrote: >> >> Having listened to the desktop-discuss & printing-discuss postings for >> sometime I haven't seen anything about XPS (XML Paper Specification) >> that will be in the next release of MS Windows (and back ported to XP) >> ... >> >> http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/ >> http://www.globalgraphics.com/xps/ >> http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/XPSDrv_FilterPipe.mspx >> http://www.softwareimaging.com/products-services/xps/index.asp >> >> I was just wondering if there are any plans for Solaris/OpenSolaris >> applications and print system to support this document format/PDL? >> -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Cunningham Software Engineer
