Re: The printing work has been merged

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

John (J5) Palmieri wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 23:03 -0600, Yevgen Muntyan wrote:
>  
>
> > First, how is all the printing stuff supposed to be used? Namely,
> > how settings are going to be managed, what settings should be
> > handled globally by gtk, and what should be handled by application?
> > Is it going to be like in windows, where you use Page Setup to
> > change settings in the given application, and click Printer Properties (?)
> > button to get dialog to modify global settings? In other words,
> > what do I do to get GtkPrintOperation object which is fully set
> > up according to user preference?
> >    
>
> This is application specific.  Basically you have a settings object
> which can be sent to the dialog as a default.  We can also look at
> making global settings but we haven't really though about it.  This is
> perhaps better left to a layer above (like
> gnome_get_default_printer_settings or something of that nature).
>  
But non-gnome application can't use that. Before, it did make
sense to use gnomeprint to get printing functionality, but now,
as printing gets into gtk, it's weird to have to use gnome only
to get printer settings (and on windows it's just impossible).
Shouldn't it be in GTK, so that gnome, or xfce, or whoever else
could use it?

> > Next, how to add your own settings? Say, gedit has its own
> > home-made Page Setup dialog for header/footer, but now
> > there is stock dialog? Will GtkPageSetupUnixDialog be extensible,
> > and will windows dialog be exposed to allow customization?
> >
> >    
> There are extension points in our design.  Not sure if we added the
> application tab yet.  Basically windows allows any number of tabs and
> Mac allows one extra tab.  We have decided that one tab is enough (you
> can add subtabs if you need but we hope you don't).  For windows and mac
> we were looking at the feasibility of embedding gtk+.
>  
This is great (though there is no api right now).

I have two more questions:
What about preview? Will there be some PrintOperation::draw_preview
or something?
And, is it possible to have some progress dialog for the stuff between
begin_print and end_print? It's possible to make a custom one, of course,
but some stock one would be certainly better.

Best regards,
Yevgen