Re: Printer driver UI [proposal]

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

   From: Chema Celorio <chema ximian com>
   Date: 13 Mar 2003 17:09:35 -0600

   A number of people in the printing community have identified the
   need to improve the user experience in this particular area that
   you are describing. The main issue I see with your proposal is that
   you are trying to describe how the UI is going to be layed out by
   the GUI application, I don't think we want to do that but rather
   provide the information to the GUI level so that it can make smart
   decisions as how best to layout the interface.

I agree.  The description shouldn't describe the UI, but should
describe the grouping and characteristics to enable the UI to be
rendered appropriately for the underlying windowing system.  KDE and
GNOME may well want to render the UI differently, but there are still
likely to be common characteristics that could be exploited.  For
example, controls for a particular channel (which might be
named/described by RGB color), the type of the control, constraints
between controls, etc.

   I'd like instead for the data that something like gnome-print or
   KDEPrint gets to be grouped, categorized, etc. so that we can make
   a smart decision about how the GUI looks. You could say for example
   this attributes are color adjustments, this are advanced options
   and we should know where we want to put the widely used options
   (like we do now).

Exactly.  For example, the controls for a cyan gamma curve might be
described as

name: cyan gamma
type: float
  min: 0.01
  max: 9.0
  default: 1.0
channel: <0,255,255>
class: gamma_adjustment
level: advanced

The UI would then decide upon the appropriate grouping.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk alum mit edu>      

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf uunet uu net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton