[cups.development] Re: Looking for developers: processing of Windows EMF files for CUPS, NX, Samba and Freedesktop.org printing

[Christoph Lindemann]

Hi All,

Embedding fonts into SPL files is possible. I have yet to decipher the
records for this.

Regards,
Christoph

PS. The SPL format at http://undocprint.printassociates.com is not totally
correct yet. There are some issues with padding bytes. Some records are
padded to a multiple of 8 others are not. I will update the specifications
as I find out more.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wolfgang Glunz" <wglunz at pstoedit.com>
To: "'Fabian Franz'" <FabianFranz at gmx.de>;
<samba-technical at lists.samba.org>; <cups-dev at easysw.com>;
<wine-devel at winehq.org>; <nxdevelopers at nomachine.com>;
<foomatic-devel at linuxprinting.org>; <dev at graphics.openoffice.org>;
<general-list at linuxprinting.org>
Cc: "'Wolfgang Glunz'" <wglunz at pstoedit.net>; "'Christoph Lindemann'"
<christoph at lindemann.nu>; "'Kurt Pfeifle'" <kpfeifle at danka.de>
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 12:30 PM
Subject: RE: Looking for developers: processing of Windows EMF files for
CUPS, NX, Samba and Freedesktop.org printing


Hi Fabian,

First of all thanks a lot for this nice compilation of informtation about
this topic.

My comments:

One of your proposal is to add PS-import to OpenOffice. I guess you know
that this is quite a complex task in general as PostScript is not as
"simple" as other formats. PostScript is a programming language itself - you
one needs an engine to excute these programms. Pstoedit used ghostscript to
do this.

Further you propose to spool SPL files from Linux to Windows. But - at what
level? Do you propose (I guess not) to embed just a bitmap into the EMF/SPL
file comprising the page to be printed or do you propose to transfer
"high-level" data such as vectors and text? In the latter case I see the
same problem which pstoedit currently faces (btw - your assumption that
pstoedit handles only single characters is not correct). The major problem
are - as so often - fonts. OF course it is simple to write a TextOut record
to the SPL file, but how do you know whether the font exists on the final
system where the SPL has to be rendered to the printers format. As far as I
know, embedding fonts in EMF/SPL is not possible - but I may be wrong. Even
if it is, then this may expand the EMF to sizes which are not practical to
be printed over low-bandwidth connections (that was the initial context of
the discussion). But that may be also true for bitmap/raster based printing.
Back to bitmap based EMF/SPL printing. I think GHostScript already has a WMF
driver writing a raster image in WMF format. So that should be already quite
close to the solution. Just add the SPL wrapper ....


Best Regards

Wolfgang

(main developer of pstoedit)

P.S.
About NX. Anyone knows what happed to LBX (low bandwidth X)? Wasn't that
also thought to be the solution for running X over low bandwidth
connections.