In-Reply-To: <cqcjii$hs0$1@sea.gmane.org> dave@boost-consulting.com (David Abrahams) wrote (abridged):
That's okay for simple things, but for any serious printing work you need to know you're talking to a printer. For example, you may need to embed postscript in your output stream.
Not all printers support postscript, so you'd need to know not just that you were printing, but what kind of printer it was. Although there probably needs to be some kind of abstraction-busting pass-through mechanism, I see it as the exception rather than the rule. Another issue is transparency. My employer's drawing framework supports semi-transparency in the form of an alpha channel. This is used by us for things like anti-aliasing, and by users for subtle colour blends. Some printers can support transparency directly and some cannot. We found we needed a relatively elaborate architecture to hide that detail from application drawing code. I'm a bit concerned about the scope of this boost project. Our drawing framework is pretty huge. -- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK