Printing in EOG

[Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra alumnos utalca cl>]

Hi guys,

Currently, I have been working on moving the printing in the Eye of
GNOME from the old libgnomeprint and friends to GtkPrint + cairo. A few
days ago I committed to our experimental branch eog-ng a pretty simple
patch which removes the dependence on libgnomeprint and uses GtkPrint.

Given that the current printing status in HEAD was pretty broken, I
decided to backport the patch to HEAD and I committed it there, too.

So, now in HEAD we have a pretty simple (but working) printing support.
Printing works by simply centering the image if it fits in the paper. If
the image doesn't fit, then we scale it down to the paper size and
center it.

Here is where I need you to help me:

1. TIFF related bugs
====================

There are a couple of bugs open regarding the behavior of printing with
TIFF images, namely:

  Bug 355590 – Printing TIFF images I only get completely black pages[1]
  Bug 367085 – TIFF images prints/views incorrectly[2]

If you can give a test to the printing features in HEAD and check if
these bugs are still a problem, please do it. I will appreciate if you
can comment on those bugs with your appreciations on the matter.

2. Cool image scaling and positioning features for EOG
======================================================

If you check Bug 321815, comment #3, you will read the following[3]:

        "there is basically NO gnome app that makes printing
        pictures reasonably easy. eog and f-spot don't care about the
        size
        of the image. gthumb does, but it doesn't let you select the
        printer. Now what if my default printer is a draft one..."

This is true. And long time before I first thought of hacking on this, I
realized that this is a big flaw on GNOME for normal users. The GIMP is
way too complicated if you only want to print an image. So...

In Bug 356947 [4], you will find the work Felix and I have done so far
to create a tab for the printing dialog which would allow users to
customize the image position and size. We are not pretty sure how much
the options we added are overlapping with the options on the other tabs
of the printing dialog, so I think we need some advice here. Please grab
the latest patches, give them a try, and put your comments there. We
really need you!


Thanks for your attention so far, you can go back to your normal
activities :-)

Greetings,

Claudio

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355590
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367085
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321815#c3
[4] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356947

-- 
Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra alumnos utalca cl>