docs/doxygen/overviews/unixprinting.h

   1 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
   2 // Name:        unixprinting.h
   3 // Purpose:     topic overview
   4 // Author:      wxWidgets team
   5 // Licence:     wxWindows licence
   6 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
   7
   8 /**
   9
  10 @page overview_unixprinting Printing Under Unix (GTK+)
  11
  12 Printing under Unix has always been a cause of problems as Unix does not
  13 provide a standard way to display text and graphics on screen and print it to a
  14 printer using the same application programming interface - instead, displaying
  15 on screen is done via the X11 library while printing has to be done with using
  16 PostScript commands. This was particularly difficult to handle for the case of
  17 fonts with the result that only a selected number of application could offer
  18 WYSIWYG under Unix. Equally, wxWidgets offered its own printing implementation
  19 using PostScript which never really matched the screen display.
  20
  21 Since GTK+ 2.10, support for printing has been added to GTK+ itself and
  22 beginning with wxWidgets 2.9, GTK+ printing is used by default (i.e. unless
  23 <tt>--without-gtkprint</tt> was explicitly used when configuring the library).
  24 Support for GTK+ print is detected dynamically, i.e. during the run-time: if it
  25 is found, printing will be done through GTK+, otherwise the application will
  26 fall back to the old PostScript printing code. This allows the applications
  27 built with wxWidgets to still work on the very old systems using GTK+ earlier
  28 than 2.10.
  29
  30 */