[Gnumed-devel] printing solution

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Along the lines of the Latex solution I stumbled upon another solution

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9283

There is even some code in the article.

The reason why I was looking for it is the long term goal to display the form 
to the user before printing.

Initially I thought of this because pyqt is advertised with SVG support but it 
turns out that there is wxSVG

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxsvg/files/

I am not sure if python bindings exist but their CVS indicates that is the 
case.

If I am correct the solution currently employed by Karsten involves PDF 
created from Latex.

Here is a comparison:

_______________________________________
feature                 | latex                 | svg                           
        |
----------------------------------------------------------------------  |
authoring       | Lyx                   | Inkscape                      |
output          | pdf, ps               | svg, pdf, png                 |
viewer          | external pdf  | external pdf                  |
depend.         | latex,                | xslt                          |
                        | ghostscript   |                                       
|
installation    | doable                | involved for wx               |
                        |                       | out of the box for QT |
__________      |__________     |_________________      |

For now it seems to me the latex solution is easier to implementand since it 
mostly is a behind the scenes shell solution. The SVG stuff is probably just 
as easy as a behind the scenes solution but has some potential when going GUI. 
For the Latex solution no matter if we talk wx or QT we need would need an 
embeded pdf viewer. 
Same for the SVG solution if we use pdf. However wxsvg or qt can display the 
svg directly prior to printing. SVG has become a standard nowadays so Firefox 
and Google Chrome can display it without any plugins.

Sebastian