Sascha, I am afraid Johanna is merely being honest to what is a very
widespread misconception. Even Walter Bender has challenged me to invent
a charcoal-based printer.
And that was in response to my assertion, which I am happy to repeat any
time it is needed, that the lack of printer support by the XO is indeed
a very valuable feature, not a bug.
I do agree with you about the huge and totally unnecessary waste of
energy and water that printing would entail.
However, most teachers and so-called education systems are paper-based.
That is one among many ugly realities we have to deal with, a cognitive
dissonance that hinders the success to a new POV for education.
Moreover, even when digital-based, people are not "on the same page", a
still valid expression... It was recently mentioned by a Uruguayan
teacher that the forms that are being sent to be filled out by teachers
by their national administration are MS Office documents, thus cannot be
worked (easily) in the XO!
Of course I insist you are right that from a real education point of
view printing is mostly irrelevant, *compared to* the possibilities of
collaboration, the web, etc. But that is, *compared*... :-(. If
teachers and students are not using those opportunities either, then it
is only natural that only what is inked on paper is worth anything.
So, are they using those opportunities?
a simple example: by the end of 2009, Uruguay had over 366.000 laptop
<http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Ceibal>s or so in the hands of
teachers and students, and available to be used by their families, etc.
*However*, by May 15 of 2010, there were only 162 Wikipedia
<http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_en_espa%C3%B1ol#Colaboradores>
"colaboradores" from Uruguay! One for every hundred teachers, or one per
every 2.000 students and their families...
As long as we cannot change this kind of approach to the XO or any other
such tool, teachers will, indeed, "need" to print.
On 05/12/2011 03:19 PM, Sascha Silbe wrote:
Excerpts from Johanna Wener's message of Thu May 12 21:08:31 +0200 2011:
The big problem I have is, that everything that the children do on the olpc
could not be used for learning because there is no way to print their works
out.
I expect others to reply to the educational part of that sentence (i.e.
is there a better way to reach your goals than consuming lots of energy,
water and trees?).
We tried to make a screenshot and send it by mail - doesnt work!
What exactly have you tried and how did it fail?
Walters brand-new Portfolio activity [1] has support for exporting
selected, annotated Journal entries as HTML. You could save it to a USB
stick, open the HTML file on a computer with an attached printer and
print from within the browser.
If you install CUPS on the system running Sugar (probably an XO judging
from the subject), you can use a browser other than Browse to print
locally. Or you can copy the Journal entry to the regular file system
using copy-to-journal and print using the "lpr" command from within
Terminal.
A whole bunch of other options would combine the following:
1. Acquiring a printable file:
a) take a screenshot by pressing<Alt>+1
b) some activities can export as PDF
c) some activities can export as HTML
d) some activities use a file format that can be read by non-Sugar
applications (e.g. Write uses ODT, native file format of
LibreOffice nee OpenOffice)
e) Write 73 can export to PDF, so you could try using the clipboard
to import content into Write and export as PDF
2. Transferring the file to Gnome or a different computer:
a) copy to a USB stick, SD card or USB hard disk using the Journal
b) using copy-from-journal from within Terminal to copy the Journal
entry to the home directory (so Gnome can access it)
c) using datastore-fuse [3] to access the Journal entry from within
Gnome (experimental - you might need help from a techie)
d) uploading the files to some web site (Moodle, wiki, photo
gallery like Flickr, pastebin site, ...) and accessing that site
from the computer with the printer.
3. Printing from within Gnome or on a different computer running a
desktop system other than Sugar:
a) for PDF and ODT just opening the file and printing from within the
PDF viewer resp. word processor should usually work well enough.
b) for HTML use a browser. You might need to tweak some options to
get pretty output. I've seen browsers cutting a line of text in
half; hopefully that's fixed by now.
c) Gimp is pretty good for printing images, though it could be a bit
overwhelming.
d) CUPS understands several file formats natively (including images);
just type "lpr name_of_the_file.jpg" (without the quotes).
I'd love to tell you to download the Print activity [2] and print
directly from within Sugar, but unfortunately I haven't managed to get
it to work yet. However, the above options hopefully get you unblocked
now; we can work on better solutions later.
Sascha
[1] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4437
[2] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-August/thread.html#18173
[3] http://git.sugarlabs.org/datastore-fuse
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