Print Function? about xi-mac

[raphlinus]

It used to kinda sorta work (but not very well) because we were drawing the text with Core Graphics. Now that we draw using a fast text plane, it's not surprising that even this has regressed.

It seems like a useful feature. It's not exactly trivial, because the front-end does not generally have the entire document available, but something basic could probably be wired up.

[cmyr]

And we should disable the print menu item pending a fix.

[vlovich]

Hmm... this seems like a deceptively hard problem to actually get right.

1. The entire document needs to be rendered. Does the front-end have a mechanism for getting + rendering anything more than the current view?
2. Plugins that add style information to a document (e.g. syntax colouring). How will we know when they're in a steady-state? Maybe we need some kind of versioning system so that print takes a snapshot of the rope & we wait for all the plugins to report finished on that version? What happens if a plugin is taking too long? If we cut it off the text would be rendered potentially in an inconsistent state. If we don't then the printing would block waiting for the plugin...

[raphlinus]

Agree with both concerns. We used to have a sync RPC to render lines, and this could be used, but ultimately I think this is best not handled in the front-end, as the front-end protocol doesn't have ways of accessing a consistent snapshot, knowing when the plug-ins have quiesced, etc. Of course, that means adding those features to the plug-in interface, as well as access to the style info.