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