KDE4 printing: results of IRC meeting

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Alex Merry wrote:
> On Friday 14 Sep 2007, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> On Friday 14 September 2007 11:26:36 Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
>>>> Printing arbitrary page ranges/selections:  
>>>> ==========================================
>>>> The ability in the KPrintDialog to select to print only certain
>>>> pages in a non-continuous range, e.g. 1, 4, 6-10.  This option is
>>>> only available under CUPS and not under any other Printing
>>>> Systems or Qt.  Nice to keep, but not fatal, can wait for 4.1.
>>> The support for this feature by CUPS is simply achieved by passing
>>> "-o page-ranges=1,4,6-10" to CUPS. CUPS receives *all* the pages,
>>> and extracts the desired ranges from the received jobfile.
> 
>> If you select one page only in a 10-page printout in KDE 3 and then
>> check to see the print preview, you see all 10 pages. I know from
>> experience it'll print only the pages I asked for, but I think it
>> should be displaying only the pages that will be printed.
>>
>> In other words, the preview should happen after the page extraction.
>> Which in turn means that it's probably a client-side feature. Since I
>> know that KGhostView shows pages when I select Print Preview, I know
>> it's still somewhere in KDE code.

I don't necessarily agree with these consideration for all use cases.

Sometimes/oftentimes I need to see in the preview all the pages in order
to be able to make up my mind about which page-ranges I want to select
for print at all.

This is especially true for KHTML and text printing. So whatever changes,
I'd like to keep an option that allows me to preview all pages.

> This is how Qt4 treats the issue - it's entirely client-side.  KPrinter 
> allows the application to either volunteer to do the page selection 
> itself or get the print system (only works with CUPS) to do it.

"only works with CUPS" is not toooooo much of a limitation, if 99% of
users do have CUPS in use (I'm disregarding Windows users now).


-- 
Kurt Pfeifle
System & Network Printing Consultant ---- Linux/Unix/Windows/Samba/CUPS
Infotec Deutschland GmbH  .....................  Hedelfinger Strasse 58
A RICOH Company  ...........................  D-70327 Stuttgart/Germany