>  On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:29 PM, Glenn Linderman <perl@[...].com> wrote:
> > So I've used Win32::GUI quite a bit, and been happy with it, but now I'm
> > faced with a project that wants to be portable, multilingual, manipulate
> > fonts and rich text, and wants to do printing.
> >
> > Portability, for this project, means the big 3: Windows NT, Mac OS X,
> > Linux.  Others would be nice -- Windows 9x, Windows CE, Mac OS 9,
> > Solaris, but that'll be on an "if easy" basis.
> >
> > So I do a survey of GUI packages:
> >
> > Win32::GUI -- no portability
> >
> > Tk -- Portable. Supports Unicode & fonts. No rich text support.  No real
> > printing support, not even in TCL/Tk.  A few packages for specific
> > platforms, not all platforms supported, no abstraction for portable
> > printing APIs.  No rich text support.
> >
> > Wx -- Portable.  Supports Unicode & fonts. Rich text support. Some
> > printing support on some platforms, not fully abstracted.
> >
> > Qt -- Portable.  Supports Unicode & fonts. Rich text support (looks like
> > HTML or XML to some extent).  Abstracted printing support -- a few
> > things are limited to a subset of platforms.
> >
> > So Qt sounds the best.  Did I miss one of significance?
> >
> > But now here's the kicker:
> >
> > Perl::Qt hasn't been updated since 2003.  PyQt had a recent release in
> > May 2008.  Should I go learn Python?


So it looks like Windows perl users are not portable perl users, from 
the dearth of responses to this message (on on-list, one off-list).

I do appreciate Huub and Geoff responding; the lack of any confirmation 
that wxPerl can support printing on Linux was disheartening; the 
suggestion to learn C# was approximately similar to my suggestion that I 
might have to learn Python... and implies that Geoff doesn't know of a 
cross-platform printing-capable GUI package for Perl either.  I'm not 
too interested in being jerked around by M$ by using their proprietary 
languages; yes, I know that Mono can/does run on Windows and they do 
have an open source C#, so it would be possible to avoid M$ development 
tools, but how long they'll be able to stay compatible with M$, and the 
fact that M$ doesn't even stay very compatible with itself (witness the 
VB 6.0 =>  VB.Net transition) doesn't encourage me in that direction.

A shame that the world's 2nd most portable language (assuming C is the 
most portable) doesn't seem to have a portable, printing-capable GUI.

I've been reading about Python and Qt, and PyQt, and it looks good, and 
seems to be cross-platform.  I'm getting a few small programs going on 
Windows, and hope to test them on Linux and Mac soon.


-- 
Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/
===========================
A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove.
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