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

[Thomas Zander]

On Friday 07 September 2007 15:35:50 Alex Merry wrote:
> I've gone through the KPrinter methods that are duplicated in QPrinter,
> and everything except the stuff dealing with dialog pages (ie: all the
> getter and setter methods) are simply passed to QPrinter's QPrintEngine
> now.  There is also scope for passing other properties to the
> QPrintEngine.
>
> As for the dialog pages - the Qt4 way is to call the
> Q[Abstract]PrintDialog constructor with the QPrinter as an argument,
> rather than calling QPrinter::setup().  We could adopt that approach
> (keeping KPrinter::setup() for compatibility, as QPrinter does) with a
> public KPrintDialog class.  Even if KPrintDialog can't inherit from
> QAbtractPrintDialog (I haven't looked at that yet).  That would have
> the advantage that you can use QPrintDialog to set up a KPrinter
> (solving at least part of the issue of Windows printing - the dialog;
> which should provide the printer name...).
>
> So I certainly think it's feasible, and I suspect it will make kdeprint
> a bit simpler (although it's going to be quite a bit of work converting
> it... I'll try putting a skeleton together this weekend to see how it
> looks).

I was looking at things as well, and I had in mind a slightly different 
approach, let me know what you think of this;
we create a separate project that aims to kill off KPrinter (the class) in 
favor of using QPrinter everywhere.
This probably includes altering Q[Abstract]PrintDialog to allow it to have 
a application-specific dialog, as well as a way to show a dialog while 
printing with the current page number on it.
I'm sure some features that are now being handled by ghostscript have to 
be re-implemented in this extention to QPrinter as well.
The aim of this project is to get rid of the notion that QPrinter is not 
good enough for KDE. As I'm personally puzzled what exactly the issues 
are and the issues we are talking about seem to be easy enough to solve 
correctly without having to have a KPrinter we are stuck with for the 
test of KDE4 again.

It may be useful to note that I started at Trolltech last Monday to work 
on Qt.

Comments?
-- 
Thomas Zander
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