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

[Jos Poortvliet]

On 9/7/07, Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.

Congrats. How does it feel to be a Troll???

> Comments?
> --
> Thomas Zander
>
>