Re: Gimp won't reduce graphics to Print Size on printing

[Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@xxxxxxxx>]

To: gimpwin-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Hedley Finger <hfinger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:29:55 +1000

Kent:

>> The implementation team has to choose just what
>> range of printers in what printer families it
>> will support, and then cater to all their quirks,
>> at the architecture, design, implementation, and
>> testing stages.

> I thought the whole point of the Windows GDI was
> that the programmer didn't have to know what the
> backend printer and its driver was.  The
> programmer makes the print output write to the GDI
> and the printer manufacturer's driver honours the
> calls made by the GDI.  Why does this sound too
> simple?

Well, first of all because Microsoft came very late
to the game of establishing a standard driver
interface. The AmigaOS, for example, had such a
standard "out of the box"; Microsoft was somewhere
post MS-DOS and well into the MS-Windows family of
OSen before the idea finally penetrated that
standard programming interfaces were useful to
hardware manufacturers as well as (possibly
competitors to Microsoft) software creators. Of
course, that "standard" interface didn't do much
good if the vendor of each OS established a
_different_ programming interface standard, which
then became the situation.  It is only when the
standards become collective ANSI or ISO standards
that they start to be useful.

Second, standards become minimal interfaces,
constraining new product features. Also, obeying or
disobeying standards becomes a tactical marketing
decision.

If a manufacturer wants to differentiate its product
[or if it wants to get a "vendor lock" on its
customers], then it will "extend" its product beyond
the standard, creating new capabilities, that are
in turn only useful if the OS vendor cooperates and
supports the class of devices, device by device
separately. 

Alternately, the monopolist may deliberately
misapply the standard, as Microsoft does essentially
100% of the time to make stuff like Internet
Explorer impossible to script in W3C standard HTML.

[You _want that_ as a near monopoly vendor, because
then the products created will have to be tailored
by the vast cloud of software cobblers specifically
to match your interface, will have to use a
non-standard set of features catering only to you.

Those non-standard features to make up for the
ideosyncracies of interfacing with your monopolist
product then won't work on the competing products
that obey the standards precisely, except by
extra effort to include some form of conditional
execution, so expensive to create that the result
quite often succeeds iin driving your competitors
out of business even though their behavior is the
"correct" one. It just happens to be business
suicide.]

For example, you'll see this very often in website
HTML code at commercial sites, that the first thing
that is done is to detect the customer's browser
type, and then serve web pages dynamically catering
to that browser type, or alternately serve static
web pages with a mess of internal conditional
execution scripting (think JavaScript) to cater for
each supported browser type. If browser vendors all
stuck to implementing all of and exactly the well
known and published standards, none of that
conditional execution would be necessary.

The moral lesson there using a well known example is
that just because you have a standard in writing
like HTML 4.01, doesn't mean the problem of dealing
with "stuff", say, printers, case by case depending
on the manufacturer and model, has been overcome.

However, given all that, Tor tells us that GTK+ is
broken for MS-Windows at a much more fundamental
level than that.

[Of course, that kind of failure has long ago been
made unnecessary by Posix and other standards.  If
Microsoft actually supported existing standards,
that kind of failure couldn't be a problem, the
interfaces would behave just like the Linux ones do,
just as Posix and other standards say they should
do. That, however, would make the OS an unimportant
detail of what a buyer wants in a computer, and
Microsoft, who gets rich selling its OS, would go
broke as the customer found it to work just like the
free OSen do.]

Or so I believe.

xanthian.

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