Re: GnomePrinterSelector private?

[Jim Evins <evins snaught com>]

I have collected a set of screenshots from various programs to
illustrate the various types of controls an application may need in a
print dialog and to spur this conversation on.  These are located at:

	http://snaught.com/misc/print-dialogs/

This by no means very exhaustive.  And by no means am I suggesting any
of them have a descent UI design (except maybe gLabels :-)).  Many of
the controls in these dialogs certainly should be provided by common
dialog components (assuming a GNOME app), and many of them, although
common, should be optional.  However, there are many controls that are
certainly application specific.  In which case the developer needs to be
able to add these controls to the print dialog in a manner that is
consistent with the needs of the application.  Probably one of the more
complex examples is the PhotoPaint 9 dialog.

I guess what I am concerned about is that when you suggest embedding
application widgets in the GnomePrintDialog, that the method used is not
too limiting.  For instance, I would not be happy with simply adding my
widgets to a single GtkVBox or if it was assumed that my widgets only
fell within a limited set of categories.

Like I have suggested before, If you keep the current tabbed-notebook
style of dialog, I would be happy being able to prepending or appending
my own pages.  Is this the case?  Can you elaborate on what you have in
mind?  Also, will this be introduced in the 2.2 version, or is this
going to wait for 2.4?

-Jim

On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 13:10, Chema Celorio wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 17:41, Jim Evins wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > 	Is GnomePrinterSelector (gnome-printer-dialog.h) going to no longer be
> > public in the 2.2 API?  The header file is no longer installed with
> > 2.1.2.  This was very useful in the 2.0 API for constructing custom
> > print dialogs.
> 
> I have been wanting to declare the API of gnome-print stable [*1], and
> are feeling _very_ close to it. I stopped installing headers that I
> wasn't sure why app developers would need to use them, this is something
> that I'd like to discuss further.
> 
> You want to create custom printer dialogs, but it seems to me that the
> best way to do that would be to provide that functionality within
> gnome-print-dialog.h, and allow apps to embed widgets into it. Custom
> dialogs will not gives users a consistent UI for printing and whatever
> improvements we do or features we add (and some of those are coming this
> way soon) users will not get.
> 
> So i guess my questions are:
> - How does gnome-print-dialog not satisfy your needs?
> - Could this be fixed in GnomePrintDialog?
> - Can you provide a good case where you would need this?
> 
> regards,
> Chema
> 
> 
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