[Denemo-devel] Printing from Denemo

[Richard Shann]

I started having a look at printing directly from Denemo this morning,
as I noticed that gtkprint stuff is in the current Debian gtk package.
(And I want to get an otb windows version of Denemo that does not
require the user to know about lilypond, pdf readers etc). But it seems
that I would have to use a cairo interface which does not (yet) seem to
be documented. At the critical point in the gtkprint docs you get
http://library.gnome.org/usr/share/gtk-doc/html/cairo/cairo-context.html#cairo-t
which is not found.
Chatting about this on irc with Nils, lead me to think that this was
perhaps the wrong approach. We do not generate the printable data,
LilyPond does. As this is an external program, and so it would make
sense if we handed the printing over to an external program too, rather
than reading the output of the LilyPond interpreter back into Denemo and
using internal print routines to render it back out to a printer.

This then would require us to know about some external print programs
which (for windows) we could package using gub. For linux the user could
change the prefs for external pdf viewer to a pdf-printer invocation,
provided they have one that takes just a filename as the parameter. (Of
course, knowledgeable users would write a wrapper e.g. in bash to invoke
a pdfview in print-only mode). Having said that the --help of evince
does not indicate that it has any --print option to invoke it in a print
and quit mode. (evince being the pdf viewer that Debian ships by
default).

Any suggestions? - at the moment we have a quite ridiculous toolbar with
two print buttons neither of which print, not to mention such dangerous
things as Cut (without working undo) and so on.

Richard