[open-beos-printing] Re: Updates?

Hi Simon,

Gauvin schrieb:

Julun wrote:
I intended more to have a separate "Save as PDF" menu item, which indeed uses the hopefully existing printing code, to write out the file directly based on the applications stored BPrinter.
Why create a separate menu item for a specific file format? What happens when the user wants to save to PNG, or DOC, or XML, will the file menu have "Save as <FIlE TYPE>" for each FILE TYPE menu item in the File menu? Of course not, and the reason is one of dependency. Creating a "Save as PDF" creates a hard dependency between the GUI and the function of saving various file types. That's why translators were invented, so that this dependency can be broken and allow system-wide functionality that essentially comes free with every program.
Although technically difficult to do, and perhaps all the more reason to do it, creating a PDF translator is not impossible. The issue, from what I can understand from the conversations here, is one of pagination.
Well, that would be the smallest problem. Imagine the following case, there are two word processing application available for Haiku. One is really stupid, like StyledEdit, it's fine to put everything into BPrintJob and pass it on to the translator. But then there is the other one, Haiku Office ;) and it is trying to be smart, having hyperlinks, animations, flash, clickable links to jump inside the document or whatever one can embed, now try to solve that with BPrintJob and get it into the pdf...
So the application needs to implement it's own exporter, to get all features out. I instead intend to have basic pdf output available, nothing fancy.
And of course you can add the "Save as pdf" menu item wherever you want and call the printer code later on. What would prevent you as dev from doing this? Come on. :) 

Regards,
Karsten

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