AW: [Kde-print-devel] Status of KDEprint in 4.0, and offer of help

[Alex Merry]

On Thursday 06 Sep 2007, Tom Albers wrote:
> At Thursday 06 September 2007 11:22, you wrote:
> > One missing point:
> >
> > KPrintDialogPage does not now anything about windows printer, so
> > people may think that using QPrintDialog would help.
> > This helps to be able to select windows printers and all the other
> > stuff like page selecting, page format and so on, but does not
> > support application specific printer dialog extending (like
> > umbrello does for diagram selecting) because QPrintDialog on win32
> > uses the native Printing Dialog  (PRINTDLG Api function).
>
> Hi,
>
> Which raises the question: do win32 users not see a native dialog
> with the current print setup?

I'm not even sure how well printing will work on windows.  The code 
assumes a unix-like system in various places, for example the use of 
kdesu if it can't read the file.  Windows has an lpr utility, but I 
don't think will necessarily run an lpd service for it to connect to.  
TBH, I don't even know how applications send data to print on Windows.

>
> I'm still not convinced we should not use QPrintDialog, it would save
> us a lot of problems in the future. How often is the current print
> dialog extended by application specific things? Is this worth

A lot: http://lxr.kde.org/ident?i=KPrintDialogPage.  I count 22 separate 
programs, plugins or libraries appearing to create custom pages.

> wrapping QPrinter instead of inherit it? Maybe we could make a list
> and ask our Norwegian friends to have a look at that (pre/post hooks,
> add a custom widget*, ?). Since there seems to be no developer
> interested in maintaining the code over time, I feel we should make
> it as maintainance free as we can get it.

Cristian Tibirna is the current maintainer, but I get the impression he 
doesn't have a lot of time to devote to this.  However, at least John 
Layt and I are obviously willing to work on printing.  I'd certainly be 
happy to work on it in the longer term, but neither of us is a printing 
expert, or even that familiar with the considerable KDE Print codebase.

I'd hate to see KDE's excellent printing system go down the pan because 
of lack of interest in maintaining it.

Alex



-- 
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