[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Till Kamppeter
till.kamppeter at gmx.net
Wed Dec 14 08:39:50 PST 2005
Mike Shaver wrote:
> On 12-Dec-05, at 8:33 PM, Till Kamppeter wrote:
>
>> And we all were of the opinion that
>> the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox and
>> Thunderbird) needs improvement.
>
>
> Before Firefox 1.0, there was much kerfuffle over this, and out of that
> came a pledge from someone in the GNOME camp to separate the
> gnome-print dialog system from the gnome-print "you must render through
> this" system, such that the dialog could be used on GNOME desktops. I
> don't think it ever materialized, though I can't be bothered to look
> for the bug now. After the amount of crap I took for pushing to get
> the GNOME file dialog in -- and I mean that it was the single biggest
> usability complaint from our Linux user community by several orders of
> magnitude -- I was in no real rush to go that route again. I remain
> unrushed, but if people want to do the work (including the user-testing
> work, keeping in mind that we actually care about GNOME installations
> that are more than a year old, etc.) then there's probably time to get
> it changed in Firefox 2 if the patch is good enough.
>
> (The KDE people are much less vitriolic about how Firefox is wearing
> white after Labour Day on their desktop, for whatever reason, and
> nobody has bothered to even wire up the file dialog, except for one
> frustrated hacker who used GNOME.)
>
> Of course, we support more than just Linux in the Unix-printing world,
> but if the time has come for an XP_LINUX that differs from XP_UNIX, or
> even XP_LINUX_GNOME, then I'd be willing to hear a pitch for it.
>
>> 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.
>
>
> I *humbly* submit that that group is not the right set of people to be
> discussing the future of the printing model in Firefox and
> Thunderbird. By all means put together a proposal for improving how we
> print on Linux, but please don't think that it will be accepted simply
> by fiat (even my mighty fiat, ahem!). I also caution against what
> we've seen as a pattern so far, which is "well, then we'll just patch
> our build", for various reasons that aren't really appropriate for this
> list.
>
> Mike
>
>
I think, the Firefox/Thunderbird dialog has to be replaced urgently, I
do not know how the original one looks like (I am on Mandriva 2006), but
when one clicks on "Properties" and gets a cryptic printing command line
to edit, I think this is far from user-friendly. Then a long list of PPD
options is already MUCH better.
What are the exact rquirements for a Firefox/Thunderbird printing
dialog? Who in the Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird team is responsible for
the dialog? So that one can talk with him.
Till
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