[Desktop_printing] Gtk+ Printing Dialog

Kurt Pfeifle k1pfeifle at gmx.net
Tue Jan 31 13:25:46 PST 2006


On Wednesday 25 January 2006 15:40, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 12:52 +0100, Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote: 
> > Alexander,
> > 
> > is the Gtk+ code intented to work inside Gtk only? 
> > Could you make it possible, to turn the planed printing dialog into 
> > something generic, useable for other toolkits as well? Maybe this can be 
> > achieved by modularising. So toolkit specific things are separate.
> > 
> > A unified dialog would be a chance to bring the printing behaviour in 
> > sync and take the desktop as one coordinated product.
> > Applictions like Scribus, Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, CinePaint should all 
> > behave in a similiar way. A common effort between KDE, Gnome, FLTK ...
> > developers would be much appreciated. Each of the above applications has 
> > unique features, which will not be copied easily. 
> > Adobe's CreativeSuite is a good example, how a group of appliations can 
> > work close together.
> 
> My task is to design a printing API for gtk+, including a dialog to use
> on Linux. This dialog will naturally be written in gtk+, since this it
> is specially written for gtk+. It might be possible for other
> applications to use a gtk+ dialog (i.e. OOo can do this with the gtk+
> file selector dialog), but that is the extent of cross-toolkit support
> the dialog it will have.

Actually -- we could do even a bit better than that...

How about trying to design (with the help of professional usability 
experts, and under the influence of some real world user testing) the 
basics of a usable print dialog interface (GUI) in a joint effort?

A GUI that includes the most simple printing features in a basic layout, 
as well as all the more advanced options CUPS supports in a more advanced 
layout (and a way to switch from simple to advanced)?

The main stake holders in that sub project would be Gnome and KDE, and
we could well use input from CUPS, Mozilla/FF, OOo and others.

I think it would be a worth while effort. We'd all win (including our
respective users). (I say this as one of the guys who helped design the
KDEPrint/kprinter UI).

The actual implementation would be done by each toolkit/DE afterwards.
It could make the thing less confusing to users too.

> I'm all for working together on the backend design and implementation
> though, so that all toolkits show the same printers and things like
> that.

Of course, cooperation on backend design is also crucial.

> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>  Alexander Larsson  

Cheers,
Kurt



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