Curtis Hovey wrote: > On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 10:02 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: > > >>>Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and >>>desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for >>>engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME, >>>Firefox, and Thunderbird. >>> >>>Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot >>>listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against >>>listing these options. >> >>I don't remember any such discussion, though I could be wrong. I think >>it's highly unlikely. It's more likely that the GNOME print system was >>difficult to do and started out with something simple. And it hasn't had >>much attention lately while we've waited for other parts of the printing >>system to fall into place. >> >>The gnome-print list might be a better place to discuss this: >>http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-print-list/ >> >>Also, there seems to be consensus that we are now almost ready to get a >>real standard print dialog into GTK+ itself, so gtk-devel-list is suitable >>too. But rather than cross-posting this probably needs someone to >>coordinate things, if nobody is doing it already. Your ideas are a great >>start on this. >> >>(I'm not a libgnomeprint* developer.) > > > By coincidence, I lost this last weekend of hacking on my projects to > address my wife's greatest concern at the moment...printing her holiday > pictures. She has HP 7660 PhotoSmart equipped with a photo tray that can > do margin-less printing on three sides. She knows it can do this under > Windows without configuring it. She could configure the printer to > print (using the CUPS backend with Ubunut Breezy), but was near tears to > print family pictures. >
In KDE you simply choose some borderless mode via the "Driver Options" tab in the "Properties" dialog and the printer does what you want. > gThumb, gnome-photo-printer, and f-Spot could not print the photos > correctly, in-part because the print dialog, and ultimately gnomeprint, > makes too many assumptions about the user's needs, and either sends bad > data to CUPS, or just sends too much. For example some applications (do not know whether especially also GNOME) have hard-coded margins, so they never are able to print borderless. And without the info from the PPD it is non-trivial to switch a printer to borderless (there is no standard PostScript command doing that). > She could save to file, and from > command line, print a perfect photo using options, or a CUPS instance, > or another spooler setup on the same printer. Save the file from your GNOME app and call kprinter, that seems to be the way currently. > CUPS does work, and she > knows it. Our print systems doesn't work and she knows it. I have > modified the UIs, the defaults of gnomeprint, and her PPD to satisfy her > needs--and the Just Doesn't Work for me. > Here you see that you work with a newbie-friendly desktop. > We do need something somewhere between exposing options that confuse > most users and default options that are based on the needs of printing > text. Instead of classifying people as power-users and lusers, we should > consider a way to configure an application to satisfy the task at hand. > Users, and applications assume roles in their work. Applications could > have (I hate writing this) 'modes' to change one or more behaviors to > satisfy the user at that moment. Computing would be easier when the > application understood the role it was playing with the user. I > personally would like one browser, but I am a Web developer and a user, > so I use Firefox with developer extensions and Epiphany to satisfy my > needs. > One thing which I already started with some drivers (HPIJS, Gimp-Print, pxlmonno/pxlcolor) on linuxprinting.org is introducing the "Printout Mode" option. It has a list of simple task-oriented choices and behind the scenes it sets several of the original driver options (more or less like scene modes in a digital camera), but the original options are not thrown away, they are put into another option group in the PPD so that in a GUI they get into a separate tab. Gutenprint developers did similar things: On certain options you have task-oriented choices, so you get a decent printout with a few clicks. The power user switches them to "Manual" and can then do more than 100 individual adjustments. Till _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list Desktop_architects@lists.osdl.org https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects