Hi,
Mark Bond wrote:
While this is to some extent true, its mainly only those printers labelled as Windows printers, generally cheap inkjets (and now some cheap lasers as well), by paying a bit more you can get printers that use standard print languages (postscript, HPL, ESC/2 etc), as far as Im concerned something similar to the Unix way of working would be a good stop gap (and is the way CUPS works really), which is to standardise on (say) postscript output and then the print system converts that to the specific driver for your printer (ghostscript does this already as does CUPS I believe).
Another thing (which we are actually actively looking into) is to standarize the actual screen and printer graphics. Currently, printing works completely different from screen graphics on AmigaOS, which isn't a good idea.
What we are looking into is Cario (www.cairographics.org), which is a 2D vector graphics API that does support exactly this (device independant graphics). It already has backends for PostScript and PDF, so it's a good choice. Plus, it's possible to hardware accelerate it's screen drawing functionality through OpenGL, since it's based on an XRender like compositing engine. This makes it quite interesting.
Printing has been in my mind for a while as well, what with the generally fairly poor state of Amiga OS printing, anything has to be an improvement really.
Indeed. A complete overhaul of the printing system is planned for 4.1
Regards,