[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Murray Cumming]

[snip]
> We considered especially as the problems of GNOME's printing dialog that
> there is no access to the full feature set of the printer according to
> the PPD file used for the CUPS queue. Also pre-processing (N-Up, ...)
> and scheduling options (hold until 6pm, ...) of CUPS are not available
> in the GNOME dialog but they are available in the KDE dialog.
>
> 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.)

Murray Cumming
murrayc at murrayc.com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com