Re: Printer driver UI [proposal]

[Chema Celorio <chema ximian com>]

On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 03:44, Michael Goffioul wrote:
> >    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.
...snip..
> As you see, I'm talking about tiny things that an expert Linux
> user probably finds completely useless, but IMO can contribute
> to the user-friendlyness of Linux for the desktop. And maybe if
> we can agree on a solution, printer manufacturers will start to
> provide their own UI description.

I know it sounds like a worthy goal, but you are describing the user
interface on a very low level part of the system. The description is
going to be hard to define and most importantly hard to fine tune and
update. Also, you are basing your printer driver xml structure on the
way the gui is going to look, rather than making the gui attributes of
the options themselves.

I appreciate this is an attempt to make printing user friendlier, but
differences in the KDE and GNOME print dialogs is by far not the biggest
issue right now.

I've worked with the glade project (our project to define UI in XML
files) and it is a very complex task to do. Also, if we where to go with
this model we are going to have to hope and pray the driver provider
does a good job laying out the options. Having the option categories and
groups also removes dependencies between teams. I don't want to have to
have to email 3-4 guys and argue everytime I want to move an option to a
different page on the print dialog, nor I think anyone wants we have to
maintain ourselves efficient.

Let the driver describe the options well and we both can write the code
to lay them out nicely.

regards,
Chema