Print layout engine for Linux. Fully ICC aware

[riclin]

Just for the sake of transparency... This was all done with AI. Claude Opus for the heavy lifting and an open source au model for the coding.

I don't know how to code but I know about operating systems work in general (I'm a systems administrator) and know the color managed printing path on Linux quite well.

There is about 50 hours of work involved on a project like this and probably as many pages of copy paper in the recycling bin. The initial code produced by Claude had gotten so many things wrong because it thought it knew what it was doing.

I still really enjoyed the experience. It's like having a junior programmer that does a lot of mistakes. In a few cases, when mistakes were made I realized I needed to give the AI more info to begin with

Very impressive results - compiled up cleanly and does what it says on the box. Congratulations! - we've moved into a new era of code development eh? A suggestion on behalf of potential users outside the US - perhaps you might consider incorporating metric measurements as an alternative (or addition) to imperial units for image sizes? - although you already allow for metric "A" paper sizes, the image sizes are all in inches - mm or fractional cm would make a lot more sense when working with metric papers. Otherwise - great effort!! Thanks.

r/

 

[crenedecotret]

Very impressive results - compiled up cleanly and does what it says on the box. Congratulations! - we've moved into a new era of code development eh? A suggestion on behalf of potential users outside the US - perhaps you might consider incorporating metric measurements as an alternative (or addition) to imperial units for image sizes? - although you already allow for metric "A" paper sizes, the image sizes are all in inches - mm or fractional cm would make a lot more sense when working with metric papers. Otherwise - great effort!! Thanks.

r/

Thanks for trying it out I think we are soon entering an era where people will need to think about how things work but not necessarilly need to worry about the code itself.

The "A" sizes was on my to do list but I wanted to get all the basic functionality out of the way first. That should be very easy. There is probably some other areas where I would need to switch to metric.. border calculations for example where right now i'm using the point system.

I probably also need to think of a way to package this to DEB, RPM or flathub but I have no idea where to start.

Just out of curiosity, what printer did you try it on? I only had a few available to me at home and at work but the printer properties detection code was difficult to set up