An early draft name for Passepartout was "Framer" since it deals with frames. (We like FrameMaker a lot, not that it has much in common with Passepartout.) This was a very dull name, so we changed it. A passepartout is a kind of cardboard frame you put around watercolour paintings.
Passepartout 0.4 and later uses the stable libxml++ 1.0 API. Versions prior to 0.4 will only be guaranteed to build with exactly the version or versions of libxml++ that are specified in the INSTALL file.
Pkg-config can't find libxml++, because it doesn't know where to look. Try adding the path to the file libxml++-1.0.pc to the environment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH. If libxml++ is installed in /usr/local/ then the path is /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/.
You don't. You write the text in XML format in your favourite text editor, then you import the text into Passepartout. Read the User's Guide for more detailed instructions.
Not at all. Text is only imported by reference. If you edit and save changes to the XML file, Passepartout will notice the change and update the display.
Not yet. Is does support grayscale text though. The <font> and <para> elements accept the gray attribute which can be a number between 0.0 and 1.0.
Not now, but in the future, we hope to make it possible to run Passepartout from a script.
Yes. Regrettably, xml2ps is poorly documented. The command xml2ps -p 400x600 -p 200x500 < foo.xml > foo.ps prints the content of foo.xml on two pages (400 x 600 and 200 x 500 points respectively) and saves the result in foo.ps. The file foo.xml must be in the xml2ps DTD. If you want to use another DTD, you will have to filter it through a stylesheet with xsltproc.
xml2ps does not support text margins or images.