On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 12:37 +0300, Nickolay V. Shmyrev wrote: > Placement in copies looks strange for me. That's the KDE way. I just wanted to have it in the dialog. We can certainly move it around. > Will something like "Several pages to one > ..." better than the current label. It's a bit long. How about 'Any page to 1'? > I'd better use something like radio "Both, Even, Old". Radio buttons are so space consuming. Perhaps a menu with those entries? > Actually I wonder if all this advanced functionality can fit in one dialog. At least on several tabs. I'd like to add a colorspace selector, too (b/W, gray, color). That's easy to implement in libgnomeprint (just a filter that converts the colors to gray or black/white) and very useful. But I don't know how to call it GUI-wise and where to place it. > Probably our usability list can say something or at least flame on it. Yes, please. > That is why I am asking is there some mockups for a new dialog or > another type of proposal. There isn't even a website for libgnomeprint. > Sorry for above if you like present state ;) I am open to suggestions as long as we move forward. There hasn't been any development on libgnomeprint in the last couple of years, but I think it is worth working on it. > > For what do you need the dialog, anyways? > About printing itself. You see there are several task that libgnomeprint > can deal with - first of all, access to system hardware (that is the > common part). Ok, that's the first tab. > Second, conversion between formats (cairo <-> postscript > <->pdf <-> pixbuf <-> gnomeprint metaformat). That is also quite common > although, for some apps like gedit or gnumeric it's better to create > data in gnomeprint metaformat or probably with cairo in the future. But > for some apps like our evince, it's much easier to generate postscript. libgnomeprint is no conversion program between formats. That's what gstreamer was designed for. > But we still need dialog functionality and functionality to access the > printer. Older API allow as to do that, newer don't. We can't work with > our postscript files and it seems almost impossible for us to create > documents in gnoemprintui metaformat. How about giving apps the choice to add their own tabs? - The printer tab can always be there. - Remove the paper selector tab - it belongs to the "print setup" menu item. - Show the job tab only if the app generated libgnomeprint metadata. If not, the application needs to create its own tab if it can offer advanced features like page selection. > Due to such problem with already have a lot of requirements that really > hard to satisfy (for example, poppler only generates A4 and there is no > way to make it respect page settings in the dialog and so on). That's why I'd like to get rid of the paper selector tab. > So, we need the ability to "embed" our app between document generation > code and sending data to printer. That task was handled by > gnome_print_set_file function that've never became stable part of API. We can make it part of the API. Again, people will then be prevented from all those fancy options, but that's the decision of the application, not libgnomeprint. > Or we need a way to convert postscript to gnomeprint metaformat for > passing it through printing framework. Just render it. We can use the gstreamer framework for that - then you can also read PDFs, images... It's easy done with just one plugin for gstreamer. > And about preview. You see it's a widget and it's almost the same widget > as evince main view. You know, implementing a good custom widget is very > hard, just because it requires very careful attention to details like > accessibilty and so on. That is why I am asking about common parts of > evince work and gnomeprintui work. Probably we can find some common part > in our widgets and work on them together. Users will ask you for > continuous pages in print preview one day, then you'll remember evince > once again :) Can you drag and drop individual pages from evince to another document shown in another instance of evince? As I understand, evince is 'just' a viewer. The gnome-print-preview lets you delete pages, reorder them, insert pages from another print preview... Can we split this discussion up into several parts/emails? (1) Printing PostScript documents (-> conversion to meta format, dropping fancy GUI options...) (2) Improving the user interface when using the GnomePrintMeta format (where to place the reverse option...) (3) Finding synergies between evince and the gnome-print-preview Regards -- Lutz Müller <lutz topfrose de>
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part