On Wednesday 16 March 2011 18:44:31 John Layt wrote: > 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.
Many thanks, John, for never giving up with improved printing in KDE! There a two main issues I see with the current approach of the CPD, and if possible, you could bring them up in the discussion. First, regarding the "common" part of the printing dialog, I hope that using a common denominator of features offered in all operating systems does not reduce the feature set again; we already went through it. (I guess you know the existing bug reports. It boils down to the major feature loss that we got when killing KDE 3.x printing system.) The new printing dialog should not be shy on options, such as pamphlet printing, customizable filters, and (most importantly) application specific options with the ability to allow saving settings in global or application specific profiles. The second concern is about the D-Bus API. I hope that it will still be possible to get a fast in-application preview with it when using the native API. For example, I love how the current Qt printing preview dialog just copies image pointers in the QtPrinter painting engine, so that the preview renders literally the same images as the application has in memory, without copying the actual data. The Qt printing preview is also very fast in scrolling and zooming, I doubt it would be possible with a program that effectively "just" tries to parse PostScript or PDF printer files just to generate the preview. > 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. Kai-Uwe Behrmann (maintainer of KDE color management applications) can help you here. Grab him on http://www.oyranos.org/ and make sure he attends the meeting ;) Christoph Feck (kdepepo)