KDE4 printing: results of IRC meeting

[Jos Poortvliet]

On 9/13/07, John Layt <johnlayt at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> 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.

Windows does support this, I use it often. You have a line-edit where
you can write stuff like:
1,5,6-9,21-23
and it'll print those pages. This is printer independent (one of the
few features in win printing NOT depending on printer drivers,
actually).

>It's this feature that will probably be missing from 4.0.

I'd miss it, but if it's there within 6 months in 4.1, I won't come
crying here ;-)

> 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.

Indeed.

> Cheers!
>
> John.
>
> --