In article <MIGUEL.93May19173030@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx> miguel@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx (Miguel de Icaza) writes:
quoted text
>> At some point you will probably want to write some printer drivers for
>> this amazing word processor (optimism? :-).
>> Can I suggest that when you do, you write them in such a way that
>> other applications will be able to use them too.
>
>That's easy to correct, you just generate Postscript code and run the
>result over Ghostscript.

One of the up-and-coming things I've seen in the X world is software which
makes the printer look like an X display.  That way, the same X calls used to
display on the screen can be used to print.  There's a company selling this
for Unix, and DESQview/X has something like this built in (it may even be the
same software, for all I know).

So:  find out how the server API works --- for example, do you eject a page by
calling XClearWindow() as in DV/X, or some other way? --- and duplicate it.
You would then have the print server sitting on TCP port 6007 (or AF_UNIX
socket /tmp/.X11-unix/X7); note that this doesn't require the knowledge or
consent of the standard X server.  Nor does it require that the program use X
for its screen display, so someone working off a serial terminal could still
print via the server (!).  (Display :7 didn't quite come out of thin air; it's
what DV/X uses.  But that doesn't make it law.)

We should consider using reasonably well documented interfaces for hooking new
printer drivers into this.  Say, the Ghostscript driver interface, so we can
take Ghostscript drivers and link them into the print server without
modification.

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery         kf8nh@kf8nh.ampr.org          bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org

It's not too late to turn back from the "Gates" of Hell...
Linux: the free 32-bit operating system, available NOW. Why waaaaaait for NT?