RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Printing on Linux

["Charles Moir" <CharlesM@xxxxxxxx>]

> John Tytgat said:
> Apart from the smooth shadings, won't Xara's transparency 
> features not cause various issues when printing via 
> PostScript is done (unless you fallback on the giant bitmap 
> printing approach) ?

As far as I'm aware there are no printer drivers, of any type that cope
with transparency. Postscript doesn't, even Postscript 3 doesn't. It's
only PDF 1.5 that introduced transparency.  But the printing industry
standard, PDF-X, absolutely insists on no transparency at all simply
because they know the unreliability and the scarcity of true support for
transparency at the Postscript level.

So I believe you'll find all applications, Xara, Adobe, etc, flatten
(i.e. rasterize) transparency where required.  Xara has used an
intelligent flattening approach, rasterizing the minimum region
necessary.  So if you create a flat color shape, and overlay a
semi-transparent over part (or use any effect that requires transparency
such as feathering, shadows etc) and we have no option but to output a
combination of vector shapes with overlaid flattened bitmaps where
required to simulate the correct output.

The bottom line is that users don't know or see this - printing drawings
containing transparency just works, as it always has on Xara. i.e. the
software does what is necessary in order to print the correct result,
and if that involves printing parts of the image as bitmap, then that
has to be.

Charles