Re: High level layout API for gnome print

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Will Newton wrote:

> On Friday 24 Oct 2003 11:50, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 11:38:11AM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
> > > Is there any high level API built on top of gnome print to do document
> > > layout? I am currently evaluating gnome print for printing reports and
> > > forms from our system.
> >
> > I'm not clear what you mean.  Can you provide an example ?
>
> We need to do some reports of various things - database metrics,
> etc. For this it would be good to be able to do tables, centering
> and justification. We've looked at various layout languages like
> LaTeX, XSL-FO and Docbook, but none of them seem to really be
> flexible enough.

XML is supremely flexible -- look more closely.

> We also have a requirement to be able to print some of our on screen
> forms, which are built from glade and rendered by GTK. Would this be
> possible to do easily?

There are various ways of rendering XML in gtk and related libraries.
From a base of XML (e.g. via docbook) you can generate HTML for
on-screen use, PDF or Postscript for printing, plain text, etc.

Allin Cottrell
Wake Forest University