Re: [gedit-list] First pass hack of gedit and gtksourceview port to gtkprintoperation

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On 5/1/06, Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com> wrote:
> > Paolo Maggi wrote:
> > > P.S. While I am at it, I'd like to point out the current print API 
> > does
> > > not allow to add custom print ranges to the print dialog. In gedit, 
> > for
> > > example, we allow users to print from "line X to line Y".
> > >
> > >
> > Yes, I didn't want to raise this issue in the first mail, because I
> > thought that async pagination was a more important issue and I didn't
> > want to mix the discussion, but since you mention it... When I asked on
> > irc about print from line to line the reaction was along the line of "Oh
> > well, who uses that anyway". This may or may not be true[1], but IMHO it
> > has been taken a bit lightly: this issue is not specific to gedit, but
> > it's pretty general to all the apps that are not WYSIWYG, where you may
> > want to print a known range without first going through the pagination
> > and print preview process.
> >
> > Another similar example is a spreadsheet: I checked MS Excel and it
> > allows to print a custom selection of sheets.
> >
> >
> > Along the same lines and even more common is the necessity to print the
> > current selection (which technically is pretty similar to 'print from
> > line to line' since it's just another custom range).
>
> While I have a hard time seeing print from line to line as a very 
> useful feature
> (do you expect me to count the lines before I open the print dialog ?),
That's what the line numbers margin is for. Or you can look at the line 
number in the statusbar.

>   I can
> easily see "current selection" as a useful value for the range 
> selector. And
> it should be easy to add.
Yes, but I would prefer to not see it added as a special case (like the 
"current page" case).

Doing it like that sounds like pushing policy that should be up to the 
app into the toolkit, especially since this stuff is possible with 
libgnomeprint... As I said above, I think that a generic mechanism to 
choose a custom range of the document to paginate and print is a pretty 
basic need: a spreadsheet that wants to just prints some sheets, a CAD 
app that wants to just print some views of a project etc, etc


Paolo