[texworks] Current status of Tw development

[Stefan Löffler]

On 2010-11-17 18:41, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 17 nov. 2010 à 17:48, Stefan Löffler a écrit :
>
>> I agree that printing would be nice to have. As would be, e.g.,
>> continues display in the previewer. Or preview abilities for dvi and ps.
>> Some people might request that as well (and probably rightly so).
>> However, none of that is currently available in a state to be put in a
>> stable release right now (IMHO, at least).
> That's perfectly fine by me. I'm sorry if you felt my messages as pressure towards adding printing in the upcoming release, that wasn't my purpose. Here I was just reacting to the presentation of TeXworks as just another PDF viewer, as opposed to an integrated TeX GUI. It's perfectly fine that it doesn't include printing yet, or continuous scrolling. Better omit something IMHO than offer it half-baked and inconsistent, it can be added later when it's ready for all platforms. That was the point of my original message: make sure the patch is omitted in official builds if it's not available for all platforms.

No problem :). We're going in the same direction, anyway ;).

>> Well, printing should work on Linux by use of the command line tool lpr.
>> This may be available on all typical installations, but I don't know for
>> sure. Besides, its quite old (there are other, more modern systems like
>> CUPS, but again you need to have it installed, you need a proper
>> interface, ...) and options (like which pages to print, ...) are device
>> specific. So it works, but hasn't been tested thoroughly. The same
>> system would be used on Mac, but if it's typically available there at
>> all I have no idea.
>> On Windows, the postscript code is sent to the printer directly if that
>> is supported.
> Mac OS X's printing architecture is built on top of CUPS, which has been purchased by Apple a few years back. The command line tool lp is included
>
> http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/lp.1.html

Thanks, this at least is reassuring.

> There are probably OS X frameworks integrating this with an interface, or maybe Qt does this, but on such areas I must confess my total ignorance.

Well, there is a Qt interface. It can print vector data, provides a nice
printer settings dialog, etc. What it can't do is render pdf/postscript.
Poppler, on the other hand, can render pdf, but in the language binding
we use (poppler-qt4) it can't produce vector data :(. That's how the
image-printing function was implemented, BTW.

Cheers,
Stefan