[Digikam-devel] DigiKam Printing

[Till Kamppeter]

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