OpenPrinting Summit - Print Dialog and Colour Management

[John Layt]

Hi,

I'll be attending the OpenPrinting Summit [1] to discuss how to complete the 
Common Printing Dialog [2] and integrate it into KDE and Qt.  I'm looking for 
any feedback people may have about the CPD, and any questions you want me to 
ask while I'm there.

The CPD is a common print dialog implementation in Qt and Gtk that gets called 
via DBus.  The dialog includes a preview image, more user-friendly options, 
better driver integration, and settings management.  Most programs will simply 
print their entire document to PDF and pass the file to the CPD and not have 
any more involvement, but there is a callback mode for longer multi-page 
documents to use.

We will obviously need new API to wrap the new workflow and functionality, 
which I think should be a stand-alone Qt-based library until such time as Qt 
can be convinced to integrate it natively.  This library will also need to 
provide fallback functionality to use the native Qt print dialog for when the 
CPD is not present, such as on Windows and OSX.  Otherwise apps will need to 
code for two different print paths depending on the platform which is not 
desirable.

You can have a play with the dialog in its current rough and ugly state at 
[3].  OpenPrinting have a GSoC project to finish the dialog this year which 
I've promised to help advertise.  It would be great if we could find a good Qt 
gui hacker to make it really shine.

Also on the agenda is integrated end-to-end Colour Management possibly using 
colord [4], something I know absolutly nothing about, so any feedback or 
suggestions people have on that will be very welcome.  For starters the 
dependencies for colord are glib and policykit.

The OpenPrinting Summit is part of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 
immediately following Camp KDE, so if you're attending and want to be involved 
in either of these areas please let me know, backup on the more technical 
aspects would be welcome.

Cheers!

John.

[1] 
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/openprinting-
summit-san-francisco-2011
[2] 
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/commonprintingdialog
[3] 
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/commonprintingdialog/testdialogfrombzr
[4] http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/ and http://colord.hughsie.com/