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

[Ralf Habacker]

Alex Merry schrieb:
> 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.
>   
If an application uses QPrinter there is no problem according 
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/qprinter.html#details says  "When printing 
directly to a printer on Windows or Mac OS X, QPrinter uses the built-in 
printer drivers. "

It is possible to directly send data to a printer 
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535786.aspx, which allows 
printing of ascii text.

postscript for example could be printed using the direct interface too, 
but this requires a printer which understands postscript directly 
because Windows by itself does not use postscript internally.

If there is no postscript printer available or non ascii text output is 
required, applications has to use the windows gdi for printing. For an 
example see  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535517.aspx

There is an optional lpd service for tcp/ip printing available but it 
requires a postscript printer on the end to support postscript printing, 
so this does not help really much.


Ralf