Hi, I'll be attending the OpenPrinting Summit [1] to discuss how to complete the Common Printing Dialog [2] and integrate it into KDE and Qt. I'm looking for any feedback people may have about the CPD, and any questions you want me to ask while I'm there.
The CPD is a common print dialog implementation in Qt and Gtk that gets called via DBus. The dialog includes a preview image, more user-friendly options, better driver integration, and settings management. Most programs will simply print their entire document to PDF and pass the file to the CPD and not have any more involvement, but there is a callback mode for longer multi-page documents to use. We will obviously need new API to wrap the new workflow and functionality, which I think should be a stand-alone Qt-based library until such time as Qt can be convinced to integrate it natively. This library will also need to provide fallback functionality to use the native Qt print dialog for when the CPD is not present, such as on Windows and OSX. Otherwise apps will need to code for two different print paths depending on the platform which is not desirable. You can have a play with the dialog in its current rough and ugly state at [3]. OpenPrinting have a GSoC project to finish the dialog this year which I've promised to help advertise. It would be great if we could find a good Qt gui hacker to make it really shine. Also on the agenda is integrated end-to-end Colour Management possibly using colord [4], something I know absolutly nothing about, so any feedback or suggestions people have on that will be very welcome. For starters the dependencies for colord are glib and policykit. The OpenPrinting Summit is part of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit immediately following Camp KDE, so if you're attending and want to be involved in either of these areas please let me know, backup on the more technical aspects would be welcome. Cheers! John. [1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/openprinting- summit-san-francisco-2011 [2] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/commonprintingdialog [3] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/commonprintingdialog/testdialogfrombzr [4] http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/ and http://colord.hughsie.com/
