KDE4 printing: results of IRC meeting

[John Layt]

On Thursday 13 September 2007, Leo Savernik wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 13. September 2007 schrieb Alex Merry:
> > The only
> > thing we'd lose in the long run from not having our own KPrinter class
> > should be arbitrary page selection from with the printing dialog (it's
> > still possible from within the application - such as checkboxes on a
> > page thumbnail view: there's a "selection" option in the print dialog).  
>
> I think the current direction is right. But this paragraph scares me. It
> effectively means that virtually no application will support page ranges
> any more. For page-oriented applications (kword, okular, kghostview) it
> means those have to provide a different interface that has yet to be
> discovered by the user. The kghostview interface is suitable for picking
> single pages, but the interface is awkward if you wanted to select, e. g.,
> 1-50, 100-250, 270-310, 350-375, 425-505.

There's a difference between application selected print range, user selected 
continuous print range, and user selected non-continuous print range.

The application selected print range is where the application only passes 
certain pages to the print system, such as kghostviews page selection thingy.

The user selected continuous print range is where the application passes the 
entire print job to the print system and the user selects in the print dialog 
a single continuous range of pages to print, e.g. 50-100.  This will be 
supported whatever option is selected as QPrintDialog supports it.

The user selected non-continuous print range is the same as continuous, but 
the user can select multiple ranges as a convenience, e.g. 20-30, 50-60.  
This is a special feature of CUPS that KPrintDialog supports. LPD and  
Mozilla doesn't, Qt doesn't (not yet anyway), I'm think OOo will also support 
it through CUPS.  Windows I think it's left to the printer driver or 
application to implement it.  It's this feature that will probably be missing 
from 4.0.

So for your example above, the user has a work-around for 4.0 to simply call 
up the print dialog multiple times and select multiple ranges.  Slow and 
annoying, sure, but acceptable for now.

Cheers!

John.

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