KDE Print porting - help needed

[Thomas Zander]

On Saturday 13 October 2007 14:41:23 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> Okular PDF printing won't work then because we need
> KPrinter::printFiles().

Lets turn this into a useful email :)  So here follows some extra info 
after a conversation with Albert on IRC.

One of the parts in okular is poppler-based, and apparently that one 
generates postscript files on print. In KDE3 the whole printing stuff was 
based on moving postscript around, so this fit without much problems.
Naturally, in the 2007 reality of CUPS moving to PDF and our main APIs 
working on Windows, a postscript workflow is deprecated and Albert has 
the problem of our QPrinter solution not fitting his problem anymore.
So its not hard to see his frustration :)

I would like to suggest that Okular talk directly to cups to push the 
postscript file poppler generated to the printer. Possibly moving some 
code from the old KPrinter into Okular to do that.

This will obviously mean users that want a more professional printing (aka 
PDF based) or want to print on Windows can't use Okular.
Let me be clear to state that this is the effect of Okular choosing the 
postscript workflow, and even if we still had KPrinter::printFiles() 
those same users could not actually print.

In fact, supporting a PDF workflow and supporting printing on non-unix is 
the whole reason we no longer use the postscript-only workflow.

I hope that makes the situation and the reasons for our choices clearer. 
Please don't shoot the messenger :)
-- 
Thomas Zander
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