Re: The printing work has been merged

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:

> > 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?
> >    
>
> I don't understand why you would need a call to get the default printer
> settings. Of course the dialog comes up with the printer defaults if you
> do nothing special.
>  
Well, I don't need those default settings at all. I just want
to be sure that I show Page Setup and Print dialogs with
the settings which were chosen by user elsewhere. As far
as I understood, new GtkPrintOperation object will be
correctly set up, and I only need to store page setup and
print settings during the session, correct?

> > I have two more questions:
> > What about preview? Will there be some PrintOperation::draw_preview
> > or something?
> >    
>
> Print preview isn't handled yet. We'll see how it turns out. There is no
> need for a draw_preview of course, since the normal draw_page works
> fine.
>  
I was thinking about pagination: if you need to draw a preview
of one first page, you don't have to split whole document into
pages; and if you need to print whole document, you need to
split it completely. So, there should be some different signal
for preview, or some 'setup' signal which would tell about
what's going on, or something like that.

Pagination can be expensive; e.g. if you are printing a text document
containing different fonts, it's pretty much impossible to guess
something without going through whole document, and
calculating every line. So there should be some progress dialog
in Print dialog before user is even able to click Print?

Yet another thing, it might be necessary to specify custom print
ranges, like "lines from M to N" instead of page range (e.g. printing
terminal content). Will there be something like what gnome-print
has for print ranges?

Oh, and by the way,

Thank you,
Yevgen