[Digikam-devel] DigiKam Printing

[Gilles Caulier]

Le Lundi 19 Décembre 2005 13:04, Till Kamppeter a écrit :
> Oi,
>
> I am Till Kamppeter, project leader of linuxprinting.org, admin on
> ebv4linux.de, and co-author of the german book "Digitale Fotografie
> unter Linux" from bomots.de. I will also organize the OSDL Printing
> Summit 2006. I have also a job, I work at Mandriva in Paris and there I
> am the developer responsable for printing, scanning, and digital
> photography.
>
> While writing on the book I have tested the printing facilities of
> DigiKam and was disappointed. I was sitting in front of a modern
> up-to-date PC in our QA department and printed a 10x15 cm (4x6 inches)
> photo and it took half an hour and during that time it was difficult to
> get the mouse pointer moved. On another photo GhostScript crashed and
> nothing came out of the printer. The printing simply took to much
> memory. In addition, the interfaces are not flexible enough and basic
> tasks like one photo full-bleed per page are not easy to do. So I
> described workarounds and alternative printing software in the printing
> chapter of the book.
>
> DigiKam is a great tool with which you can do everything with photos
> easily, except printing.
>
> Anders, I appreciate very much your work and your plans to improve
> printing with DigiKam. Especially already thanks for the patches to fix
> the memory problem:
>
> http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-devel/2005-December/002495.html
>
> I have applied them to our Mandriva package and suggested the fix as an
> official update for Mandriva 2006. Probably by the end of 2005/beginning
> of 2006 the update will come out.
>
> Also great to hear that you want to make the interface better. My
> remarks and ideas for this are:
>
> - Most important is to make the simple "print one photo per page
>   full-bleed" working as easy as possible, as this is the most demanded
>   task in photo printing. This includes:
>
>   o Have automatically set all margins to zero
>   o Have automatically cropped the photo chosen to fit the width/height
>     ratio of the chosen paper size (get paper sizes via KDE Print/CUPS),
>     optionally let the user adjust the crop (as in the KIPI printing
>     wizard).
>   o Rotate the photo to have the long edge of the photo aligned with the
>     long edge of the paper.
>   o Save printer driver options separately, so that the user can save
>     defaults for documents with CUPS/kprinter but for printing photos he
>     has the photo defaults.
>
> - Make the KIPI printing wizard more flexible:
>
>   o Offer all paper sizes according to KDE Print (the PPD file of the
>     print queue). Allow also to enter a custom page size if the printer
>     allows that. Especially bigger than A4 must be possible.
>   o For the possible photo size, once add an entry to fill up the whole
>     page with one picture (currently one cannot print a photo full-bleed
>     on A4 for example), and second, allow typing in a picture size
>     manually. Also having 2-up, 4-up, ... with photo size optimized to
>     the page size (with or without restricting aspect ratio to 2:3, 4:3,
>     1:1.41, typed in custom, ...).
>   o Offer a use-printed-page-as-album-page layout. Here horizontal and
>     vertical page stay as they are, and are not rotated to fit the page
>     or the place in the layout.
>   o Put away the "Click next button to print" wizard page, embed the
>     kprinter dialog here.
>
> - In the picture cropping dialog (in the image viewer) add 1:1.41
>   (1:sqrt(2)) as an aspect ratio, as this is the ratio of all ISO A
>   paper sizes (A4, A3, A5, A6, A0, ...). Add also some aspect ratios for
>   common american sizes (Letter, Ledger, ...).
>
> - In the wizard for resizing batches of photos, in the options of the
>   mode "Prepare to Print", there should be also common printer paper
>   sizes, as A3, A4, A5, A6, Letter, Ledger, ... be listed. Under the
>   resolutions the Epson/Canon-typical 360, 720, 1440, ... dpi are
>   missing, also asymmetric resolutions, like 300x600 dpi.
>
> Especially note that with DigiKam being a KDE application you have
> access to the great functionality of KDE Print, and here you can
> especially get all capabilities of the print queue in use, especially
> available paper sizes, margins, resolutions, ... If you have questions
> about KDE Print, subscribe to the KDE Print mailing list
>
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-print
>
> and/or contact the KDE Print maintainer, Cristian Tibirna (tibirna at
> kde dot org).
>
>    Till

Thanks for these informations Till. I'm sure that Anders will use it to 
improve printing issues in digiKam image editor, showfoto, and kipi print 
wizard plugin.

Regards
-- 
Gilles Caulier