[poppler] Printing with poppler on Windows

[Adrian Johnson]

Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:
> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Peter Åstrand <astrand at cendio.se> wrote:
>> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:
>>
>>  > I wrote Sumatra and native windows makefile for poppler (using slash
>>  > backend) and here's my advice: drop cairo and use slash backend on
>>  > windows. It's much easier to get working because it only depends on
>>  > libjpeg + zlib + freetype and when I checked in visual studio makefile
>>  > some time ago, it was working. I also provide pre-compiled
>>  > libjpeg+zlib+freetype libraries and detailed build instructions
>>  > (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/tree/README.windows).
>>
>>  Thanks. But this would mean that I'll have to implement all GDI-speak
>>  myself, right? That was the main reason why I looked at Cairo: It's GDI
>>  backend.
> 
> The way I implement printing in sumatra pdf using poppler (or mupdf)
> is by rendering to a bitmap and then blasting that bitmap to a
> printer. Not a great way to do things (lots of memory needed for the
> bitmap at printing-quality resolution) but it works and is very simple
> to implement.

This is worse than what poppler/cairo is currently doing in win32 with 
emitting each glyph as a path. In one test I did a full page of text 
resulted in a 1.5MB spool file. An full page bitmap is a lot larger than 
  1.5MB. The printing was slower than using fonts but no where near as 
slow as printing a full page bitmap. Due to the half toning on laser 
printers, printing text as a color bitmap results in a lower resolution 
than printing with paths and the text is not as sharp.