content/gsl/psprint/index.html - openoffice-org - Git at Google

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 	<TITLE>PSPrint - a Unix print solution</TITLE>
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 	<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Philipp Lohmann">
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 <H1>PSPrint - a Unix print solution</H1>
 <P STYLE="page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"><FONT SIZE=4><B>History</B></FONT></FONT></P>
 <P>StarOffice 5.2 (and earlier) relied on a thirdparty solution for
 printing. This solution could of course not be open sourced as it was
 a commercial product. So when StarOffice became OpenOffice there was
 no printing possible at all on the Unix platforms; just a wrapper was
 provided that contained stubs fitting the missing symbols left in
 vcl. A new print solution was desperately needed, so a variety of
 existing print solutions were examined, the most notable of which
 were gnome-print and Xprint. Gnome-print did not really fit into
 OpenOffice.org, since it would require to link against a huge amount
 of other gnome libraries, too, which is unacceptable for
 OpenOffice.org, because we want to run on many desktops. Xprint was
 designed as a standard Unix print solution and has many advantages:
 code for the display would work exactly the same way on the printer.
 A proof of concept version was created by Martin Maher and Oisin
 Boydell with help from Hamburg and the US which made it into
 OpenOffice.org as a temporary solution to have minimal print support
 on Unix. But Xprint in its current state misses many features that
 become increasingly important: fast character metric handling, access
 to glyph substitution tables, easy configurability on a per user
 basis just to name a few. Also one cannot really say that it has
 become the standard solution for printing on Unix yet; in fact only
 recently it was awakened from its long beauty sleep having its major
 bugs fixed so it is now useable.</P>
 <P>This led to the decision that as long as there is no standard
 solution scratching a sufficient number of our itches OpenOffice.org
 should do like everyone else and produce its own PostScript code.
 Hence psprint entered the game.</P>
 <P STYLE="page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"><FONT SIZE=4><B>Features</B></FONT></FONT></P>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P>international, multilingual print support through abstraction
 	to Unicode (UCS2).</P>
 	<LI><P>support for vertical writing (mostly for CJK printing)</P>
 	<LI><P>support for TrueType fonts and TrueType collections, embedded
 	as Type3 or Type42</P>
 	<LI><P>support for Type1 fonts</P>
 	<LI><P>support for printer resident fonts</P>
 	<LI><P>size optimized output using font subsetting for TrueType
 	fonts/collections</P>
 	<LI><P>configurable font substitution: replaces fonts that require
 	embedding with printer resident fonts on a per glyph basis</P>
 	<LI><P>use of vertical glyphs through GSUB substitution for TrueType
 	fonts</P>
 	<LI><P>image compression using lzw compression and ascii85 encoding</P>
 	<LI><P>easy user configurability through printer adminstration
 	utility (spadmin)</P>
 	<LI><P>support for printer specific features (everything you can put
 	into a PPD (PostScript Printer Description))</P>
 	<LI><P>support for portable PostScript generation through generic
 	PPD</P>
 	<LI><P>automatic recognition of system printer queues</P>
 	<LI><P>support for pdf conversion and fax (external applications
 	like ghostscript/mgetty+sendfax required)</P>
 </UL>
 <P STYLE="page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"><FONT SIZE=4><B>Overview</B></FONT></FONT></P>
 <P>PSPrint consists of the following major parts:</P>
 <UL>
 	<LI><P>Font management: done by the <CODE>PrintFontManager</CODE>
 	class. This class handles font discovery as well as font information
 	like metrics and font properties.</P>
 	<LI><P>Printer management: done by the <CODE>PrinterInfoManager</CODE>
 	class. This class handles printer discovery and information. It can
 	store and load properties of a printer, most important the default
 	job setup (which contains information like paper size, orientation,
 	etc.). To know about a printers capabilities you need PPD
 	(PostScript Printer Description) files which can be parsed with the
 	<CODE>PPDParser</CODE> class.</P>
 	<LI><P>Graphic operations: done by the <CODE>PrinterGfx</CODE>
 	class. This is really the work horse of PSPrint. It handles all
 	kinds of text output, drawing operations, bitmaps and the like.</P>
 	<LI><P>Font subsetting: provided by <A HREF="mailto://alexander.gelfenbain@Sun.COM">Alexander
 	Gelfenbain</A>. This enables PSPrint to make use of TrueType fonts
 	and collections in a very effective way by sending just the glyphs
 	that are needed down to the printer.</P>
 	<LI><P>Job management: done by the <CODE>PrinterJob</CODE> class.
 	This class ties the PostScript code produced by PrinterGfx together
 	downloading the necessary fonts as well as providing a framework for
 	the raw PostScript code.</P>
 </UL>
 <P><BR><BR>
 </P>
 </body>
 </HTML>
	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
	<HTML>
	<head>
	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
	<TITLE>PSPrint - a Unix print solution</TITLE>
	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="StarOffice/5.2 (Linux)">
	<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Philipp Lohmann">
	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20010516;17395100">
	<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Philipp Lohmann">
	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20010517;13400000">
	</head>
	<body BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
	<H1>PSPrint - a Unix print solution</H1>
	<P STYLE="page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"><FONT SIZE=4><B>History</B></FONT></FONT></P>
	<P>StarOffice 5.2 (and earlier) relied on a thirdparty solution for
	printing. This solution could of course not be open sourced as it was
	a commercial product. So when StarOffice became OpenOffice there was
	no printing possible at all on the Unix platforms; just a wrapper was
	provided that contained stubs fitting the missing symbols left in
	vcl. A new print solution was desperately needed, so a variety of
	existing print solutions were examined, the most notable of which
	were gnome-print and Xprint. Gnome-print did not really fit into
	OpenOffice.org, since it would require to link against a huge amount
	of other gnome libraries, too, which is unacceptable for
	OpenOffice.org, because we want to run on many desktops. Xprint was
	designed as a standard Unix print solution and has many advantages:
	code for the display would work exactly the same way on the printer.
	A proof of concept version was created by Martin Maher and Oisin
	Boydell with help from Hamburg and the US which made it into
	OpenOffice.org as a temporary solution to have minimal print support
	on Unix. But Xprint in its current state misses many features that
	become increasingly important: fast character metric handling, access
	to glyph substitution tables, easy configurability on a per user
	basis just to name a few. Also one cannot really say that it has
	become the standard solution for printing on Unix yet; in fact only
	recently it was awakened from its long beauty sleep having its major
	bugs fixed so it is now useable.</P>
	<P>This led to the decision that as long as there is no standard
	solution scratching a sufficient number of our itches OpenOffice.org
	should do like everyone else and produce its own PostScript code.
	Hence psprint entered the game.</P>
	<P STYLE="page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"><FONT SIZE=4><B>Features</B></FONT></FONT></P>
	<UL>
	<LI><P>international, multilingual print support through abstraction
	to Unicode (UCS2).</P>
	<LI><P>support for vertical writing (mostly for CJK printing)</P>
	<LI><P>support for TrueType fonts and TrueType collections, embedded
	as Type3 or Type42</P>
	<LI><P>support for Type1 fonts</P>
	<LI><P>support for printer resident fonts</P>
	<LI><P>size optimized output using font subsetting for TrueType
	fonts/collections</P>
	<LI><P>configurable font substitution: replaces fonts that require
	embedding with printer resident fonts on a per glyph basis</P>
	<LI><P>use of vertical glyphs through GSUB substitution for TrueType
	fonts</P>
	<LI><P>image compression using lzw compression and ascii85 encoding</P>
	<LI><P>easy user configurability through printer adminstration
	utility (spadmin)</P>
	<LI><P>support for printer specific features (everything you can put
	into a PPD (PostScript Printer Description))</P>
	<LI><P>support for portable PostScript generation through generic
	PPD</P>
	<LI><P>automatic recognition of system printer queues</P>
	<LI><P>support for pdf conversion and fax (external applications
	like ghostscript/mgetty+sendfax required)</P>
	</UL>
	<P STYLE="page-break-after: avoid"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"><FONT SIZE=4><B>Overview</B></FONT></FONT></P>
	<P>PSPrint consists of the following major parts:</P>
	<UL>
	<LI><P>Font management: done by the <CODE>PrintFontManager</CODE>
	class. This class handles font discovery as well as font information
	like metrics and font properties.</P>
	<LI><P>Printer management: done by the <CODE>PrinterInfoManager</CODE>
	class. This class handles printer discovery and information. It can
	store and load properties of a printer, most important the default
	job setup (which contains information like paper size, orientation,
	etc.). To know about a printers capabilities you need PPD
	(PostScript Printer Description) files which can be parsed with the
	<CODE>PPDParser</CODE> class.</P>
	<LI><P>Graphic operations: done by the <CODE>PrinterGfx</CODE>
	class. This is really the work horse of PSPrint. It handles all
	kinds of text output, drawing operations, bitmaps and the like.</P>
	<LI><P>Font subsetting: provided by <A HREF="mailto://alexander.gelfenbain@Sun.COM">Alexander
	Gelfenbain</A>. This enables PSPrint to make use of TrueType fonts
	and collections in a very effective way by sending just the glyphs
	that are needed down to the printer.</P>
	<LI><P>Job management: done by the <CODE>PrinterJob</CODE> class.
	This class ties the PostScript code produced by PrinterGfx together
	downloading the necessary fonts as well as providing a framework for
	the raw PostScript code.</P>
	</UL>
	<P><BR><BR>
	</P>
	</body>
	</HTML>